Today, the House of Representatives will vote on whether to renew the surveillance authority that was used to destroy my life and undermine a presidential transition. Before that vote happens, every member of Congress needs to hear the truth, not the talking points from the intelligence community, not the fear-based warnings from agency lobbyists, but the unvarnished reality of what this system has already done to American citizens.
I am one of them.
In late 2016, early 2017, my private but very legal communications were collected, unmasked, and illegally leaked to a press corps that was more than willing to serve as the enforcement arm of a political operation. I was not targeted because I had committed a crime. I was not targeted because I posed a threat to national security. I was targeted because I represented an incoming administration that the permanent bureaucracy had decided it could not tolerate. The same agencies charged with protecting America used their surveillance architecture to protect themselves from political accountability.
That is what FISA enabled. That is what Congress is being asked to renew today.
Section 702 has never been just a counterterrorism tool. For years, it has functioned as a backstage pass for politically motivated surveillance. FBI agents have used it to query the communications of journalists, political donors, protesters, members of Congress, and ordinary private citizens, often with no connection to any foreign threat whatsoever. These are not isolated incidents or the work of rogue actors. The violations have been documented in the thousands. When abuse reaches that scale, the problem is the system, not the individuals operating within it.
What happened to me was the system working exactly as it was built to work. Incidental collection became a targeted review. Targeted review became unmasking. Unmasking became leaking. Leaking became prosecution. My family lost years, resources, and peace because the government had the power to reach into private communications without a warrant, circulate what it found without accountability, and feed it to media willing to run a political hit without asking hard questions.
Congress has renewed this authority before under the promise of reform. The 2024 reauthorization — H.R. 7888 — added more forms, more audits, and more internal compliance checkboxes. None of it changed the foundational problem: the government can still collect, store, and search Americans’ private communications without ever obtaining a warrant. More paperwork does not restore a constitutional right. It obscures the violation.
Today’s vote is a referendum on whether the United States Congress will continue to sanction a surveillance system that has been turned against the very citizens it was supposed to protect.
Those voting yes should be prepared to answer a simple question: If it happened to a three-star general who served this country for over three decades, what makes any of your constituents safe?
The answer is nothing. Nothing makes them safe under a system built on secrecy, bulk retention, and minimal external oversight. Power without accountability does not stay in its lane. It expands. It corrupts. It targets.
I have called for genuine reform from the beginning. That means mandatory warrants for any search touching an American’s data. It means ending bulk retention of private communications. It means real, independent oversight with real consequences for abuse, not internal discipline from the same agencies doing the abusing. Anything short of that is cosmetic.
What Congress is voting on today is not national security. It is institutional self-protection. The intelligence community does not want warrants because warrants create accountability. They do not want sunlight because sunlight makes abuse visible. And they have spent decades perfecting the argument that any attempt at constitutional limits puts America at risk.
That argument is a lie, I know personally.
The United States maintained effective intelligence operations for generations before Section 702 existed. We can protect this nation and respect the Fourth Amendment. What we cannot do, what no constitutional republic can do, is preserve freedom while accepting permanent warrantless surveillance of its own people.
Before you vote today, ask yourself whether you believe what happened to me was acceptable. Ask yourself whether you are willing to give the same agencies that weaponized intelligence against a presidential transition renewed authority to do it again with even more institutional cover than before.
Then vote accordingly.
