cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8356680
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/45407
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on April 27, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
An exchange of gunfire between an armed suspect and law enforcement outside the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday came days ahead of a deadline for extending far-reaching government surveillance powers, and President Donald Trump wasted no time in claiming that the attempted attack on the event proved that the FBI must be permitted to spy on Americans without obtaining warrants.
In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Trump repeated his previous remarks that he is “willing to give up [his] security” in favor of extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is set to expire on Thursday—and suggested other Americans should do the same for “the safety of our nation.”
Section 702 allows US intelligence agencies to surveil the electronic communications of foreign nationals overseas without a warrant. Since some of the nearly 350,000 foreign nationals whose communications have been collected under the law are in touch with Americans, Section 702 allows for the collection of emails, text messages, and phone calls of US citizens.
Fox anchor Jacqui Heinrich emphasized that “we don’t know right now” whether the suspect in Saturday’s shooting, Cole Tomas Allen, “was radicalized” by a foreign individual or group, but asked whether the attack drove home “the importance of having these tools to protect our country from these kinds of threats.”
The president responded by complaining that former FBI Director James Comey used FISA to obtain warrants to surveil a former Trump aide as part of the agency’s investigation into the 2016 Trump presidential campaign’s communications with Russia, before saying FISA has been used in the US-Israeli war on Iran and in the US military’s invasion of Venezuela earlier this year.
“It’s really needed for national security,” said Trump. “Iran is decimated, and we got a lot of information by using FISA… I’m willing to give up my security for the military because ultimately that’s to me the highest cause is, you know, the safety of our nation.”
Pres. Trump, under prodding from Fox News, exploits White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting to push for Congress to approve FISA domestic spying program: “It’s really needed for national security…”
He reiterates that he’s willing to give up his liberties for safety. pic.twitter.com/tmcepp0Wgn
— Chris Menahan 🇺🇸 (@infolibnews) April 26, 2026
Jordan Liz, an associate professor of philosophy at San José State University, wrote last week in a column at Common Dreams that while Trump, Republican lawmakers, and US intelligence agencies “make sweeping claims about the terror attacks that Section 702 has prevented, there is little publicly available evidence to support this.”
“According to the Cato Institute, there is only one well-documented, independently corroborated case of Section 702 preventing a terrorist attack on American soil: the 2009 New York subway bombing plot,” wrote Liz. “In that case, Section 702 was used by the [National Security Agency] to track an exchange between an al-Qaeda courier and Najibullah Zazi, who was living in the US. The NSA passed this information to the FBI, which identified Zazi and disrupted the attack before it took place. Importantly, however, the NSA allegedly received the courier’s foreign email address from the government’s British intelligence partners. At best then, this success was a byproduct of productive intelligence sharing between allies. Rather than proving the necessity of Section 702, this incident underscores how Trump’s inane attacks against key US allies undermine our national security.”
The suspect in Saturday’s shooting is believed to have acted alone, and no evidence has been released that he was in communication with any foreign entities. A document he wrote alluded to his Christian beliefs and to reports of the administration’s abuse of immigrants in detention centers, its boat-bombing operations in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, and the bombing of an elementary school in Iran.
The president has been pushing in recent weeks for an extension of Section 702. The program was last reauthorized in 2024, and earlier this month two efforts to extend the program—one for 18 months and the other for five years—failed, with opponents objecting to a lack of privacy reforms and to a loophole allowing data brokers to sell private information about Americans to government agencies that have not obtained judicial approval to seize the data.
After those proposals failed, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) last week unveiled a new bill to extend Section 702 for three years and require the FBI to submit monthly reports on its reviews of Americans’ private data to an oversight official, as well as imposing penalties for abuse—provisions that were dismissed by privacy advocates.
The House Rules Committee was set to convene on Monday, a step toward advancing the new bill toward a vote in the House, and according to NPR, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) circulated a memo late last week urging his colleagues to reject the Republicans’ latest proposal.
The bill, he wrote, “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data… FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge.”
Four Democrats in the House—Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Tom Suozzi (D-NJ), Marie Gluesencamp Perez (D-Wash.), and Jared Golden (D-Maine)—broke with the party and joined the GOP earlier this month in supporting a procedural vote to advance the reauthorization of Section 702, and privacy advocates are ramping up pressure on them to oppose the latest proposal for an extension.
“It all comes down to those four and where they are going to land,” Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, told The Intercept Monday, “and if they are going to continue to try to hand Trump and [White House homeland security adviser] Stephen Miller warrantless surveillance authorities without any sort of checks or reforms that make sure they’re not violating civil liberties.”
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I don’t “know” for certain yet. But they have been really cagey about even answering whether Allen fired any shots. And the one guy they originally reported him as having shot with buckshot to the chest, now they can’t determine whether that was actually friendly fire.
These guys were all packing pistols. Iirc from photos there were some guys with ARs.
Do you think you could easily identify the effects of a shotgun firing buckshot at relatively close range from that of a pistol? I bet you could. It’s really easy. Bunch of little holes creating 1 really big hole if close enough? Shotgun. 1 small hole? Pistol/rifle.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the individual agents who were on the scene probably has a pretty good idea of what happened just by observing the state of things the moment he was captured.
It’s just that their interpretation, like any crime scene evidence, isn’t made public so we can only speculate.
The less information we have, the wilder the speculations can be and still fit the evidence. When there is new evidence the wild speculations can be updated to take into account the new information because there will always be things that are not clear or that we don’t know and a motivated person could find explanations and ‘just so’ stories that fit those gaps.
This happens constantly with Evolution vs Religion arguments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps Every time we don’t know something, some theist will come along and insert god into that unknown. We didn’t know how eyes evolved so theists said that it must be god that did it, then we learned how eyes evolved.
The trick here is that given incomplete information, which is often the case, anybody can create a story that just so happens to fit. Here, we have a ton of incomplete information so there is fertile ground for people to just make things up.
Regarding ballistics evidence, I am talking about one very specific thing that they have explicitly refused to comment on: whether he actually shot that guy. Even in the charging documents, about him discharging a firearm in the commission of a violent attmepted crime or whatever it’s called, they still don’t say that he discharged it at the ss officer.
I take your point, but I am not wildly speculating. Them witholding evidence in a very specific way is itself evidence as it implies a possibility (that the shotgun was not fired at the ss officer).
I’m not yet saying that certainly didn’t happen, just that we’re hearing different things from different sources who were present, the charging docs, etc. that do not line up in the way you expect.
That opens the door for questions around what really went down. Nothing definitive, but it raises questions.
Yeah, I understand. I did think it was odd how they were wording their statements, it made me think it was friendly fire as well.
I just think the ‘staged’ conspiracies are just complete nonsense.
There are plenty of unknowns, but to take all of those unknowns and fill in the blanks with the same ‘it was staged’ conspiracy that has appeared after every assassination attempt doesn’t help anyone understand the situation, it only creates a cloud of misinformation so it’s harder to determine what is true or not.