Trump Administration Has Ignored Legal Deadline to Release Surveillance Court Opinion on FISA Section 702 Warrantless Surveillance Program
Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., demanded that the Trump Administration stop violating federal law and immediately declassify a surveillance court opinion that details abuses by the government of warrantless surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The opinion by the FISA Court was signed on March 17, 2026, and was legally required to be declassified within 180 days, on September 13. Yet the Trump administration, in violation of federal law, has still not made the opinion public. This opinion includes details about “serious abuses of Americans’ rights” that must be made public before the Senate debates reauthorizing FISA Section 702 surveillance, the senators wrote.
“As Congress continues to debate the fate of this authority, lawmakers must be able to discuss these abuses openly,” Wyden and Schiff wrote. “Otherwise, the American people will rightly question whether a government that so flagrantly violates basic legal requirements, like the statute requiring declassification, can ever be trusted to not abuse a powerful surveillance tool like Section 702.”
The senators demanded that the administration release the opinion as soon as possible, and identify the officials responsible for withholding its timely release by November 6, 2026.
Wyden is the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Schiff is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
FISA Section 702 is a powerful surveillance authority that allows the government to collect communications of foreign intelligence targets without a warrant. However, the program also sweeps up a significant amount of Americans’ communications in the process, with no warrant or court oversight of individual searches for Americans, making transparency about abuses particularly important.
Both the chair and vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee have called for the opinion to be released, and Attorney General Todd Blanche repeatedly committed to declassify the opinion by the legal deadline.
The full letter is available here.
A web version of this release is here.