Jack Smith Secretly Subpoenaed Patel's Phone Records — Sweeping Grab Triggers New Perjury Heat

In this video, we break down the Senate Intelligence Committee Worldwide Threats Hearing where Senator Mark Warner questioned FBI Director Kash Patel about FISA Section 702 surveillance and its reauthorization. Warner confronted Patel with his own past statements criticizing warrantless surveillance of Americans and asked why he now supports a clean 18-month extension of the program without a warrant requirement. The exchange focused on civil liberties, surveillance oversight, improper FBI queries, and the upcoming congressional vote that will determine the future of the program.

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Yesterday at the Senate Intelligence Committee Worldwide Threats Hearing, Mark Warner asked Kash Patel a question that should have been easy to answer. He asked: does the FBI director support a clean 18-month reauthorization of FISA Section 702 without a warrant requirement? The word clean in that sentence means no changes. No new restrictions on how the FBI can search Americans' communications swept up in foreign surveillance without getting a judge to approve it first. No requirement that agents seek court authorization before running an American's email address, phone number, or name through a database containing millions of intercepted communications. Just the program as it exists, extended as-is, for eighteen more months, with the Trump administration's FBI in charge of policing its own use of it. Patel said yes. He said the bureau has gone beyond what the 2024 reforms require. He said the FBI now gets supervisory and legal approval before running certain searches. He said the program is indispensable. He said he backs the president's position. Warner looked at him for a long moment. Then he opened a folder. Director, he said, in 2021 you published a book. He held up a page. In that book, in chapter 3, you described FISA Section 702 searches of Americans' communications as part of what you called the weaponization of the intelligence community against ordinary citizens. You described the program as fundamentally incompatible with the Fourth Amendment rights of the American people. He set the page down. And then at your confirmation hearing in January 2025, before this committee, you stated in testimony that there had been 255,000 illegal, improper queries of American citizens under this authority, and that those were, and I am quoting your own words, 255,000 reasons why the American people don't trust it. He looked at Patel. You are now the person running that program. And you just told this committee you support extending it without a warrant. He paused. Help me understand what changed between 255,000 reasons why Americans don't trust it and yes, I back the clean extension.

Watch this video until the very end because what Patel said next, and what he could not say, is the clearest single documentation of the gap between what the Trump administration promised on civil liberties and what it is now doing that any senator has placed in the congressional record during this hearing cycle. And if you are new here, subscribe right now and turn on notifications because the April 20th expiration deadline means Congress votes in less than four weeks on whether to give this administration the very program Patel spent four years calling an outrage.

Let me give you the full factual picture because the distance between what Patel said before he had access to these tools and what he is now saying with access to them is the entire story. In 2021, Kash Patel published a book called Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy. In chapter 3 of that book he described the FBI's use of FISA Section 702 to conduct searches of Americans' communications as part of what he characterized as the intelligence community's systematic weaponization against ordinary American citizens. That description is in the book. It is a published, commercially available document. In 2023, he appeared publicly calling for major reforms to the surveillance program. He built significant political credibility among conservatives and libertarians by consistently arguing that the warrantless search capability was being abused at a scale that violated the constitutional rights of the people the government was supposed to serve. In January 2025, in his confirmation hearing before the very Senate Intelligence Committee where Warner was now sitting, Patel said, under oath, that there had been 255,000 illegal, improper queries of American citizens under Section 702. He called those 255,000 reasons why the American people don't trust it. He said Congress and the new FBI director would need to work together to restore that trust.

Between that testimony and yesterday's hearing, two things happened. The first: Kash Patel became the director of the FBI and gained direct operational control over the Section 702 program he had spent four years criticizing. The second: last week, Patel walked into the Senate Republican caucus lunch to lobby senators for a clean 18-month extension of Section 702 without a warrant requirement. Roll Call reported it. Multiple senators confirmed it. He was there, in person, making the case for extending the program, unchanged, for eighteen months. Senator Steve Daines of Montana said afterward that Patel wanted a clean extension. Senator John Cornyn of Texas said Patel was emphasizing, from the president's perspective, that the program could not be allowed to lapse. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said Patel and CIA Director Ratcliffe did a pretty good job explaining why this needs to be reauthorized now. And then yesterday, at the Worldwide Threats Hearing, when the committee's ranking Democrat asked him directly whether he supported that clean extension, he said yes. Warner's folder contained documentation of all of this. The confirmation testimony. The book chapter. The Roll Call report on the Senate Republican lobby meeting. He had prepared for exactly this moment — the moment when Patel would go on the record in a public hearing confirming the position he had been advocating in private, so Warner could place the prior record next to the current position and ask one simple question. What changed? And the follow-up, which Warner also had ready: if the reforms changed things, why have queries gone up thirty-five percent since those reforms took effect? Let me remind you what the documented Section 702 abuses were, because Patel's book and his confirmation testimony cited them specifically. Between 2020 and 2021, the FBI ran more than 278,000 improper queries of Americans' communications collected under Section 702. In a single month in 2017, more than 6,800 improper queries were run in one day. The FISA court found that the FBI had improperly searched the data of more than 70,000 people with facility access, crime victims, and people who had only submitted tips to the FBI. George Floyd protesters. January 6th rioters without proper justification. Nineteen thousand donors to a congressional campaign. Carter Page. Those are not abstractions. Those are documented cases that the FISA court itself found improper. Those are what Kash Patel called 255,000 reasons why Americans don't trust it. And he is now asking Congress to extend the program that produced those abuses for eighteen more months, without the warrant requirement that would have prevented them.

If you are still watching, hit the like button right now. Drop a comment below. Because I want to be precise about what Warner did next. He did not accuse Patel of lying. He did not make a partisan charge. He did something more devastating: he asked Patel to explain his own reasoning. Which means either Patel can explain why 255,000 illegal queries became a reason to extend the program unchanged, or he cannot explain it. Comment below: do you think any explanation survives comparison with his own words?

Patel tried to explain it. He said the reforms implemented in the 2024 reauthorization had addressed the compliance issues. He said the FBI now requires supervisory approval before running U.S. person queries. He said the number of improper searches had dropped significantly. He said the program's intelligence value, with more than half of critical presidential intelligence now generated through Section 702 collection, justified maintaining the authority without new restrictions. Warner listened. Then he said: Director, 278,000 improper queries occurred between 2020 and 2021. Since the 2024 reforms, the FBI's queries have risen by thirty-five percent in a single year. He held up a document. This is from last week's Nextgov report, citing an FBI letter to Congress. A 35 percent increase in queries. He set it down next to the confirmation testimony page. The reforms that you said would restore public trust have been implemented. Queries went up thirty-five percent. And you're here today telling us that the answer is to extend the program, unchanged, for eighteen more months, with an administration that last week confirmed it is also buying Americans' location data from commercial brokers without warrants, and that has fired the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board members who were supposed to oversee this program. He looked at Patel. Director, the 2021 version of you wrote a book about this. The 2025 version of you testified that there were 255,000 reasons Americans don't trust it. The 2026 version of you lobbied senators for a clean extension. I would like to know which version of you is telling the truth about what this program does to the civil liberties of the American people.

Patel's response had the specific quality of a man who has prepared answers for every objection except the one that uses his own previous objections as the source material. He said the circumstances had changed. He said the FBI's implementation of the reforms was producing results. He said the current threat environment, with the United States in an active military conflict with Iran, required maintaining the full scope of collection authorities. He said: if you recklessly use it, you've immediately terminated your access forever. That last sentence is the one Warner had been waiting for. Director, he said. You just said that if you recklessly use it, you immediately terminate your access forever. He looked at him steadily. The FISA court found 278,000 improper queries between 2020 and 2021. That is not reckless in your framework? Patel said reforms had addressed those compliance failures. Warner nodded. And the people responsible for overseeing ongoing compliance, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the independent watchdog established specifically to monitor whether the reforms are working, three of its members were fired by this administration last August. He picked up a document. I have the letter from those members dated August 6, 2025. He held it up. Two Democrats and one Republican, all fired by the Trump administration from the board that was supposed to independently verify that the FBI's Section 702 use complies with the law. He set it down. You are asking Congress to trust that the reforms are working. The board that was supposed to independently verify that has been gutted by the administration you now serve. He paused. And now you are asking for an eighteen-month clean extension. With thirty-five percent more queries. And no independent oversight board to check your work.

The room was completely still for eight seconds. Patel had nothing that directly addressed the PCLOB firing. He returned to intelligence value language. Warner gathered his papers with the deliberate slowness of someone who has reached the end of what this hearing can produce in public. He said: I want this in the record. In 2021, Director Patel called this program's abuse of Americans' rights a fundamental problem requiring reform. In 2025, he testified it had been abused 255,000 times. In 2026, he lobbied senators for a clean extension and came to this committee to testify that yes, he supports renewing it unchanged. He looked at the cameras, not at Patel. The American people watching this need to understand that the version of Kash Patel who spent years warning about warrantless surveillance of American citizens is now the person asking Congress to make that surveillance permanent for eighteen more months. Without a warrant requirement. Without the independent oversight board that would verify the reforms are working. And while the same FBI is also buying their location data from commercial brokers. He looked at Patel one final time. I have no further questions. But I have a vote in thirty-two days.

The April 20th deadline is not an abstraction. It is thirty-two days from yesterday's hearing. The bipartisan Government Surveillance Reform Act, which would add the warrant requirement that Patel opposed during his entire pre-director career and now opposes as director, expires without a vote if the clean extension passes. 133 civil rights, labor, privacy, and AI organizations are urging Congress to block the clean extension. 98 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have formally voted to oppose it. A dozen Republican members who voted for a warrant requirement in 2024 are being lobbied by the same Kash Patel who once wrote a book about why they were right. Subscribe right now because the vote is in thirty-two days and the version of Kash Patel who said 255,000 reasons why Americans don't trust it just went on the record in a Senate committee in favor of the program those 255,000 reasons were about. Share this everywhere. He said yes. Warner asked why. And the answer Patel gave was not an explanation. It was a position change dressed up as a policy statement.