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Mike Johnson Used Crypto Catnip to Get Freedom Caucus Support for Domestic Spy Law

A provision unrelated to domestic spying got the hard-right GOP members on board — but it won’t work in the Senate.

Far-right Republicans in the House, including many members of the Freedom Caucus, revealed the price of their support for a controversial surveillance law this week: a ban on the unrelated and hypothetical possibility that the U.S. government might one day issue digital currency.

Twenty Republicans who opposed a procedural vote earlier this month flipped their position on Wednesday to allow a vote on a three-year extension of the law that allows government agents to search Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Not all the Republicans voted for the final version of the bill, which passed 235–191, but they were crucial in giving Johnson a hand on an initial procedural vote.

Meet the Four Democrats Who’ll Decide If Trump Gets His Domestic Spying Law

The final bill drew the support of dozens of Democrats, who backed it despite the polarizing central bank digital currency ban. One of the most prominent backers was Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who gave a floor speech in support.

“We are spending some time now talking to those who want a bill that shows you can have both security and liberty.”

“We are spending some time now talking to those who want a bill that shows you can have both security and liberty.”

Now that it includes a digital currency ban, however, the House version of the law faces dim prospects in the Senate. The upshot of Johnson’s maneuvering may be that the Senate has the final say on surveillance reforms.

Longtime privacy champion Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told The Intercept that the versions of reauthorization on the table — one a three-year “clean” extension offered by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and the other the House version with the digital currency ban — were both “deeply flawed and unacceptable.”

Instead, he is pitching colleagues on requiring a warrant before government agents can search through foreign surveillance databases for the communications of Americans.

“We are spending some time now talking to those who want a bill that shows you can have both security and liberty,” Wyden said, “and they are not mutually exclusive.”

The high-stakes deliberations are happening against the backdrop of a looming deadline to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which underpins much of the National Security Agency’s global surveillance apparatus.

The law authorizes much of the most valuable surveillance populating intelligence agency reports. It has also been abused hundreds of thousands of times by officials at the FBI to scour through Americans’ communications.

FBI’s Warrantless Search Ruled Unconstitutional in a Blow to Government Spying

Johnson tried and failed to secure an extension of the law with minor........

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