Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is up for reauthorization and running into resistance from both Democrats opposed to Bill Pulte’s interim DNI nomination and Republicans concerned about documented abuses, including the FBI’s 278,000 improper database searches in 2023 and five years of NSA fourth amendment violations that a FISA court identified during the Obama administration.
KT McFarland, former first deputy national security adviser to President Trump and author of Revolution: Trump, Washington, and We the People, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess the reauthorization question, the right-of-center wave sweeping Latin America, and how the Iran situation is likely to resolve.
On Section 702, McFarland said the tool itself is valuable if used as intended and dangerous if abused, and that the abuses during the Biden administration were driven not just by political leaders directing the intelligence community against Trump people but by intelligence community employees who were themselves hostile to Trump and enthusiastically cooperative. She said the FISA court was supposed to provide a judicial check and failed because judges went along with whatever they were told. Her prescription is accountability rather than elimination of the tool, arguing that if people faced real professional and criminal consequences for misuse, the calculus would change immediately. Right now everyone assumes there is no consequence, which creates a permissive environment for abuse.
On Latin America, McFarland said Fox News correspondent David Asman connected dots that she had not previously connected, but that are entirely persuasive. For decades, USAID was funding left-wing NGOs and socialist projects throughout Central and South America, even during the Reagan administration. Since USAID was defunded and thousands of NGO contracts were cancelled, left-wing parties have been losing elections across the region with striking consistency. The American taxpayer was effectively funding anti-American political movements, which were then helping socialist candidates win elections. Peeling back the layers of that onion, she said, reveals the same fundamental pattern as the domestic NGO fraud cases, money flowing to organizations claiming to provide services while actually using it for political ends.
She said what is happening now across the Western Hemisphere is both exciting and historically significant. Javier Milei in Argentina slashed corrupt and incompetent government agencies wholesale and the economy has turned around. Nayib Bukele in El Salvador put the criminal gangs in prison and turned the country from one people fled into one people want to move to. Kiko Fujimori just won the presidency of Peru. Flavio Bolsonaro is positioned to win in Brazil. She said Marco Rubio was the first political leader to identify the United States’ ability to reshape the Western Hemisphere and has made it a theme of his entire career, and it is now coming to fruition. With Cuba potentially next, she said the hemisphere could be looking at a hundred years of peace and prosperity anchored by pro-democracy, anti-cartel, anti-communist, resource-rich nations working alongside the United States.
On Iran, McFarland said she is willing to give Trump more time because she believes the Iranians will blink first. She said the core standoff is a timing gamble: Iran thinks Trump will take any deal available because he is nervous about the midterms, while Trump believes Iran will cave first because their economic collapse is so severe they cannot hold out as long as he can. She said the economic reality favors Trump’s assessment. Iran probably does not have more than a month or two before their currency collapse and potential starvation reach a point of no return. Trump has several months before the midterm calculus becomes urgent. That asymmetry, combined with the ongoing pressure of the naval blockade and the quiet shadow operation getting a limited number of ships through the southern end of the strait on the Omani side, suggests a resolution sometime this summer.
She framed the Hezbollah attacks on Israel in an interesting way, suggesting they may paradoxically indicate something positive happening in the peace talks. She said Iran sabotaged Saudi Arabia’s pending entry into the Abraham Accords by unleashing Hamas on October 7th, and the current pattern of Hezbollah provocations looks like the IRGC hardliners trying to sabotage a peace framework that the so-called pragmatist faction within Iran is negotiating toward. If that reading is correct, the noise is evidence of progress rather than failure. She said the Abraham Accords have already evolved from a commercial arrangement into a genuine security relationship, noting the remarkable fact that Israeli soldiers are currently inside the UAE helping defend the Emirates against Iranian attack, something no one would have predicted as possible years ago. Expanding that security architecture to include Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states broadly is both the key to enforcement of any Iran deal after the fact and the prize that Iran most wants to prevent.