The Brief | The Feds' Warrantless-Wiretap Loophole of Americans Got a Ten-Day Extension
Plus: the Navy rappels onto an Iranian tanker, SCOTUS may have already decided the Voting Rights Act, and Trump signs ibogaine into the mainstream.
It’s Monday!
That means a new week and new news. I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and is recharged to take on the week ahead.
I had a wonderful weekend outside in the yard and enjoyed a baseball game. Let’s hope it was enough to get me through the week. LOL
ICYMI
Sunday Desk | Who Shows Up
A little girl ran up to Looie, the Lookouts’ mascot. If you saw Looie walking down the street, you’d swear it was Elmo in a baseball jersey and Converse with a pot belly and a baseball cap with googly eyes stuck to it as his face. He bent down, wrapped his arms around her, patted her head, and sent her running back to her parents. A high school marching…
In today’s Brief:
The FISA 702 stopgap, the hardliners who forced it, and what warrantless spying on Americans actually means
The USS Spruance boards the TOUSKA, the Strait of Hormuz closes again, and a Beverly Hills businesswoman gets flagged at LAX
Shreveport: a dad, his own children, and why calling this a “mass shooting” misses the point
Trump, Rogan, and an executive order that fast-tracks psychedelics for vets
Quick Rundown: the Callais slow-walk, the NYT SCOTUS leak, blue-state wealth taxes, and gas above $3
Surveillance powers on life support
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was set to lapse today. That’s the law letting the NSA and FBI sweep up communications of foreigners overseas, with the side effect of also catching every American those foreigners happen to email, call, or text. No warrant required.
Speaker Mike Johnson wanted a clean five-year reauthorization. Then an 18-month version. Then a year. Each one died on the House floor. A small faction of privacy hawks, led by Thomas Massie, Tim Burchett, and Lauren Boebert, held the line and refused to extend the authority without warrant requirements for U.S. person queries.
By late Friday night, Johnson was out of options. Per the Washington Examiner, it was “an overnight defeat” for the Speaker. The Senate then passed a ten-day stopgap by unanimous consent, kicking the real fight to April 30. Just the News has the play-by-play.
The White House is furious. Trump has pushed hard for a clean reauth since January, and he’s running out of Republicans willing to hand him one. Trump argues that it is vital to national security right now, as we face attacks from adversaries.
Massie has been the loudest holdout, arguing that the FBI already has a miserable track record of abusing 702 to snoop on Americans. He’s right about that. The 2023 DOJ audit documented 278,000 improper queries in a single year.
Here’s the honest question. Privacy hawks want to strip a tool the intelligence community swears it needs. The IC wants warrant-free queries because they’d rather not ask permission. Neither side trusts the other. Neither should.
Ten days until round two.
The Navy just rappelled onto an Iranian ship
At dawn local time today, the guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance (DDG 111) disabled the propulsion of M/V TOUSKA, an Iranian-flagged cargo vessel making a run for Bandar Abbas at 17 knots. According to CENTCOM, six hours of warnings were ignored. The Spruance put several rounds from its 5-inch MK 45 gun into TOUSKA’s engine room. Marines from the 31st MEU rappelled onboard and took the ship into U.S. custody.
Here’s the CENTCOM footage:
Trump declared a naval blockade on April 12 after Iranian gunboats fired on a UK tanker in the Strait. His Truth Social post was blunt: any ship paying the Iranian transit toll in Chinese yuan or crypto would be intercepted. TOUSKA is the first real test.
VP Vance is on a plane to Islamabad right now, leading the US delegation with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. That's the White House line after a chaotic Sunday: Trump told ABC News that Vance would skip the trip over security concerns, and officials walked it back within hours.
The 20-plus-hour flight means Vance hasn't landed yet. Round one, on April 11, ended in marathon talks with no deal and produced the fragile ceasefire now on fumes. Tehran state media is already hinting that round two may be off after the Spruance boarding.
Oh, and on Saturday, federal agents arrested Shamim Mafi at LAX. She’s an Iranian businesswoman with Beverly Hills ties, accused of brokering more than $70 million in drone sales to Sudan, destined for Iran’s proxy network.
Iran is simultaneously claiming 3,500 of its people have died in the war against the U.S. Whether that number is real or regime theater to TBD, but Iran is posturing, and Tehran is escalating.
The Supreme Court may have already decided the Voting Rights Act
Sean Spicer went on the DC Huddle podcast last week and dropped a grenade. His claim: the Supreme Court has already decided Louisiana v. Callais internally, and the liberal justices are slow-walking their dissent on purpose.
The quote, verbatim: “I have been told by reliable sources that the decision is done and the minority is slow walking the dissent so that states do not have time to redistrict.”
Callais is the case testing whether Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the rule that forces states to draw majority-minority districts where practicable, still holds up under the 14th and 15th Amendments. If the Court guts Section 2, Louisiana’s congressional map flips. So does Alabama’s. Georgia. Mississippi. South Carolina.
Per Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern on Bluesky, he predicted that this slow-walk would happen back in January. This is a rare moment where a right-leaning pundit and a progressive SCOTUS beat reporter are telling the same story from opposite ends of the political table.
Why the calendar matters: states need weeks, sometimes months, to redraw maps and defend them in court. A June ruling might let southern states reconfigure for November. A September ruling almost certainly doesn’t. The NYT is projecting up to twelve southern congressional seats could swing Republican if the ruling lands early enough.
If Spicer’s sources are right, this is one of the more aggressive procedural games the Court’s minority has run in memory. If they’re wrong, he just burned a lot of credibility. Watch the June hand-down calendar.
Shreveport — 8 Children Murdered by Their Own Father
Early Sunday morning, across three homes in Shreveport, Louisiana, Shamar Elkins shot and killed eight children. Seven were his. The youngest was one. The oldest, fourteen. He also shot the mother of his children, who survived, and another woman, who is in critical condition. Then he fled, carjacked a vehicle, and led police on a chase into Bossier Parish, where officers shot and killed him.
The headlines are calling it a “mass shooting.” It’s not. This is a familicide. A domestic annihilator. A father who targeted his own descendants.
The distinction matters because policy follows framing. “Mass shooting” invites gun control arguments. Familicide invites an honest reckoning with what we tolerate in domestic violence intervention, what warning signs get ignored, and how custody and restraining orders work in practice. Elkins served in the Louisiana National Guard from 2013 to 2020. Never deployed. He wasn’t some shadowy stranger. He was someone’s partner, someone’s dad.
Governor Jeff Landry and Speaker Johnson both issued statements on Sunday. I read ten versions of this story yesterday and could not shake the ages. One. Two. Three. Five. Seven. Nine. Twelve. Fourteen. Hug your kids today.
Trump signs psychedelics into the mainstream
Saturday afternoon in the Oval, Trump signed an executive order called “Accelerating Medical Treatments For Serious Mental Illnesses.” The room was a sight: Joe Rogan, RFK Jr., FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, former Gov. Rick Perry, former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, and Bryan Hubbard of Americans for Ibogaine.
The order directs the FDA to fast-track review of any psychedelic already designated a breakthrough therapy. That includes MDMA, psilocybin, and the big one: ibogaine, still Schedule I. It opens data-sharing pipes between the FDA and the VA and sets up automatic rescheduling once anything gets approved. Roughly $50 million in research funding is attached.
Trump cited a Stanford study showing 30 special operations vets with traumatic brain injuries reported an 80 to 90 percent drop in depression and anxiety symptoms within a month of ibogaine treatment.
The counter. Ibogaine has killed at least 27 people documented in clinical and retreat settings since the early 2000s, mostly via cardiac events. It’s not aspirin. The whole point of the FDA track is to run it through the same safety process as any other serious drug. Doctors are split. Some call this overdue. Others warn Trump is moving faster than the data.
Veterans have been crossing the border to Mexico and Costa Rica for this treatment for years. The order doesn’t legalize anything overnight. It stops the federal government from pretending these drugs don’t work while 22 vets a day take their own lives.
Quick Rundown
The NYT’s SCOTUS Shadow Docket leak. The Times published memos from the 2016 Clean Power Plan internal deliberations last week, citing “people familiar.” Chief Justice Roberts is reportedly livid about the sourcing. No named leaker yet, and the Court’s internal investigation is underway.
Blue-state wealth tax contagion. The WSJ reports that Maine is floating a 2 percent tax on assets over $50 million. Washington and Massachusetts are considering 4 percent. Mamdani’s NYC proposal is already in committee. Maine is not a wealthy state. The math will go the way it always does, which is that the targets move and the middle class eventually gets the bill.
Gas prices above $3 through 2027. Axios broke the EIA forecast. The Hormuz closure and the blockade are the main drivers. If you’re budgeting for summer travel or a midterm campaign, plan accordingly.
Tomorrow: the full House Ethics Committee takes up the adjudicatory subcommittee’s sanctions recommendation on Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL), who was found to have committed 25 of 27 alleged ethics violations, including funneling FEMA disaster money through family-linked businesses. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has a privileged expulsion motion queued: “Either resign or be expelled.” Speaker Johnson publicly endorsed expulsion Friday. Two-thirds threshold means Democrats have to decide whether they own the cover.
Let’s Talk About It
Section 702 is the question of the week. Clean reauthorization so the intelligence community keeps its current tool, or a warrant requirement for U.S. person queries even if it slows down terror investigations? Where do you land, and has your position changed since the 2023 DOJ audit? Hit reply.
Lightning round: what’s your heavy-news-weekend decompression move? Long walk, trash TV, church, call your mom, clean the kitchen like a psychopath? Anything special with the warmer days? I’m taking new recommendations.
The Brief publishes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Forward to someone who needs to understand what’s actually happening.