Nearly 20,000 Illegal Queries of Campaign Donors by Intel Agencies Draws Bipartisan Anger

The Justice Department building on a foggy morning in Washington, DC., on Dec. 9, 2019. Samuel Corum/Getty Images

U.S. intelligence agencies used an expansive foreign surveillance tool to spy on 19,000 campaign donors, among whom only eight had suspected foreign ties that qualified for the use of the authority, prompting condemnation from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) during a June 13 hearing.

Limited authority to gather foreign intelligence information is granted by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a post-9/11 surveillance tool that gives U.S. intelligence the power to target “(i) non-U.S. persons (ii) who are reasonably believed to be outside of the United States (iii) to acquire foreign intelligence information.”