Clinton had a hand in FISA request jump

The increase in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Orders has been going up for nearly 15 years.

The requests have doubled since Bush became president BUTthey also doubled under Clinton's presidency.

Now, there's no indication Clinton ever authorized anything to be done without warrant, or anything as focused inside America as Bush did.

And, if "things changed after 9/11," they had started to change after the earlier 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. I can understand part of the reason for the increase.

I’m not claming “moral equivalence.”

Nonetheless, Clinton did start the process of ramping up FISA requests.

See here.

And, we don’t know, as Bush claimed, just what briefing Congress got on this. Possibly nothing, in line with Bush’s lie that it got the same intelligence as he did on Iraq. But maybe, just maybe, people on the Senate and House intelligence committees did get at least a partial briefing, and enough that somebody could have said, “Hey!”