Pro-surveillance GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham suddenly supports surveillance reform following the Carter Page documents

"This morning the president is again accusing the Justice Department and the FBI of misleading courts and illegally surveilling his campaign," CBS host Margaret Brennan said to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Face the Nation Sunday, referring to President Trump's angry response to the Carter Page surveillance documents. "Is he wrong?"

"No," Graham replied, breaking with his Senate GOP colleague, Florida's Marco Rubio. Graham then called for scrutiny of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, also known as the FISA court, which approved the spying on Page.

"I think that the whole FISA award process needs to be looked at," he said. "The warrant on Carter Page was supported mostly by the dossier that came from [Christopher] Steele, who [was] being paid by the Democratic Party to do opposition research; and the dossier was collected, I think, from Russian intelligence services; and if you ask the FBI today how much of the dossier on Trump has been verified, [it's] almost none of it."

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The extent to which the warrants were based on the dossier is subject to debate along predictably partisan lines. Less predictable is Graham's sudden discovery within himself of suspicion of the FISA court: Before Trump took office, the senator was a stalwart opponent of limits on the court's power, repeatedly voting to permit warrantless surveillance and prevent reform. In 2015, he claimed "anybody who neuters" the FISA court's "roving wiretap" program "is going to be partially responsible for the next [terrorist] attack."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.