Another George Santos campaign aide has pleaded guilty to federal charges.

Sam Miele — a campaign fundraiser who worked for the Santos campaign during the 2020 and 2022 election cycles — pleaded guilty to a federal wire fraud charge as part of a plea deal Tuesday.

Miele admitted to impersonating a senior aide to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to solicit donations to Santos’ campaign in late 2021. But he did not plead guilty to identity theft as part of the plea agreement.

The guilty plea will increase the pressure on Santos, as a House Ethics Committee report is expected to be made public this week.

Santos is currently defending himself against 23 federal charges and denies any wrongdoing.

Miele’s sentencing is set for April 30, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney.

Last month, a former treasurer for Santos’ campaign, Nancy Marks, pleaded guilty to a charge of fraud conspiracy and implicated Santos in a scheme to exaggerate his campaign finance reports with fake donations and a fake loan.

The House Intelligence Committee is quietly circulating details about how to reform a controversial surveillance program — and quickly running into backlash from privacy hawks.

The talking points from the panel — a copy of which were obtained by POLITICO — provide previously unreported details on what a forthcoming bill to reauthorize and reform Section 702 will look like. The authority, which expires at the end of the year, is meant to target non-U.S. residents abroad but has come under fire because of its ability to sweep in Americans’ communications.

In a notable shift for Intelligence Committee members, who are generally more closely aligned with the community they oversee, the panel will require a warrant for a subset of searches for Americans’ information swept in under 702. The panel’s bill would require a warrant for “evidence of a crime” searches, which are not related to foreign intelligence. The administration has signaled privately and publicly for months that it is opposed to any warrant requirement, arguing that it would undermine the effectiveness of the program.

The Intelligence Committee’s proposal isn’t yet finalized. But the talking point details are far narrower than those in a bipartisan, bicameral bill privacy hawks rolled out last week that would require a warrant for any U.S. person searches. The scope of a warrant requirement is expected to be the most contentious issue in the upcoming debate, and Republicans are predicting it will need to be hashed out on the House floor.

Privacy advocates quickly warned that limiting the warrant requirement to just “evidence of a crime” searches would exempt the bulk of searches for Americans’ information outside of the new requirement.

“The vast majority of 702 abuses we have seen were ostensibly for foreign intelligence purposes, which means not only does HPSCI’s proposed bill fail to establish meaningful new privacy protections for Americans, it mostly fails to even address the ongoing and already documented misuse of this powerful spying law,” said James Czerniawski, a senior policy analyst for Americans for Prosperity.

In addition to the warrant requirement, the forthcoming House Intel bill would require “independent audits” of all FBI queries for Americans’ information. The document, however, doesn’t provide details on who would complete the audit, ties FBI compensation to query compliance and dramatically reduces the number of FBI personnel who are able to search 702-collected data for Americans’ information.

The bill also includes broader reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the larger surveillance law 702 is housed under, and an associated surveillance court.

But privacy advocates are warning that it could also expand 702. The bill, according to the circulated talking points, would allow foreigners applying for visas, immigration or asylum to be searched under 702. That comes after the intelligence community disclosed earlier this year that the National Security Agency has been using the authority for vetting foreigners who are being processed for travel to the United States or benefits under immigration laws.

It would also boost the intelligence community’s ability to use the authority to track fentanyl and drug cartels. An executive branch advisory board recommend earlier this year specifically creating a counternarcotics certification to “allow the intelligence community to collect more intelligence information about fentanyl threats under Section 702 and to become more effective in supporting the government in its fight against fentanyl.”

“This is a shameful proposal that does more to expand warrantless surveillance than rein it in,” said Sean Vitka, policy director at Demand Progress, accusing the committee of being “more interested in hiding the ball from the rest of Congress than meaningfully protecting Americans’ privacy.”

The bill leaves out broader reforms pushed for by privacy advocates on and off Capitol Hill, previewing another point of contention in the end-of-year debate.

It doesn’t, for example, include legislation that would prevent data brokers from selling consumer data to federal law enforcement. It also doesn’t move a Reagan-era executive order on surveillance under the guardrails of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

A bipartisan bill unveiled last week includes both of those provisions. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who co-sponsored that bill, told POLITICO he expects both to also be incorporated into a forthcoming Judiciary Committee bill.

Biggs is part of a joint House Intelligence and Judiciary committee working group that was tasked with trying to come up with a path forward on the surveillance authority.

The two panels are expected to now move forward with their own bills — though there will be areas of overlap for FBI and FISA court reforms.

“The one thing that everybody agrees on is not only do you have to take care of 702, you have to take care of the broader stuff,” Biggs said.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said both he and the White House are on board Speaker Mike Johnson’s bill to avoid a government shutdown.

“The proposal before the House does two things Democrats pushed for,” Schumer told reporters. “We all want to avoid a shutdown. I talked to the White House and both of us agree, the White House and myself, that if this can avoid a shutdown it’ll be a good thing.”

The New York Democrat said he had negotiated some of the particulars of the stopgap spending package in talks with Johnson, including making sure that there were no cuts in the bill and that it would put defense funding in the latter of two set spending deadlines.

Still, Schumer called the two-tiered deadline — one in mid-January and the other in early February — “goofy” and made clear it’s not how he would have written a government funding patch.

Kevin McCarthy got physical on Tuesday with one of the conservative lawmakers who voted to oust him, according to Rep. Tim Burchett, who accused the former speaker of elbowing him in a Capitol hallway.

Burchett told reporters that McCarthy elbowed him in the back as he was speaking with a reporter and that the Tennessee Republican chased after him: “I ran after McCarthy and I said, ‘What’d you do that for?’ He acted like, ‘Oh, I didn’t do anything.'”

Burchett had yelled back: “Hey Kevin, have some guts.” He also called McCarthy a “jerk,” an exchange witnessed by POLITICO.

The Tennessee Republican told reporters after the incident: “He needs to go back to Southern California” and “I can still feel it it … It was a clean shot to the kidney.”

He would not push any effort to censure McCarthy, Burchett said, but he said they could settle differences in “the parking lot” and that “it would be a very short fistfight.” He noted McCarthy still retains a security detail and likened the jab to “a guy who throws a rock over the fence when he’s a kid and runs home and hides behind his mom’s skirt.”

McCarthy denied that he elbowed Burchett to CNN: “I didn’t shove or elbow him, it’s a tight hallway.”

The episode encapsulates the lingering bad blood between the former GOP leader who was ousted from the speakership last month at the hands of Burchett and seven other House Republicans. McCarthy’s allies are convinced that the effort to eject him, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), was largely based on personal grievances, which Gaetz has denied. And this latest episode is a further sign McCarthy is still angry over the episode.

The episode quickly attracted other attention on Capitol Hill, with Gaetz calling the move “weak” and “pathetic.”

“This is wild. McCarthy resorting to pushing people in the halls. What a weak, pathetic, husk of a man,” Gaetz tweeted.

Jordain Carney contributed to this report.

Hakeem Jeffries won’t publicly say that Democrats plan to — once again — bail out the GOP speaker. But many of his members are privately prepared to do just that.

Inside a closed-door caucus meeting on Tuesday, Jeffries outlined the various ways that Speaker Mike Johnson’s stopgap spending plan is a win for Democrats, though he didn’t directly tell them how to vote on it later Tuesday. Most importantly, he said, there are no spending cuts and no “poison pill” add-ons.

As of now, Jeffries and his leadership team aren’t formally whipping their members to support the GOP’s shutdown-averting spending bill, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions, which is scheduled for a floor vote Tuesday afternoon. Still, several Democratic members acknowledged to POLITICO that their party is prepared to put up the lion’s share of the votes. And with dozens of House Republicans declaring they won’t support the bill without steep spending cuts, that’ll mean Democrats will, once again, carry the load for GOP leaders.

Speaking to reporters afterwards, Jeffries said he and Johnson had several conversations over the last few days. He declined to comment on them, though he added that he anticipates speaking more with him today. Jeffries said the caucus discussion was still “ongoing” but acknowledged the funding patch was free of extraneous provisions that could sap Democratic support.

Multiple Democrats privately predicted the party’s support could be nearly as high as the last short-term funding bill in September, where all but one House Democrat backed the bill.

In another sign of the Democrats’ support for the measure, even Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, cracked open the door to backing the legislation.

“I think those are very significant wins for us,” Jayapal said, pointing to the GOP’s decision not to cut spending levels or insert any obvious conservative priorities, commonly known as “poison pill” language. The full Progressive Caucus plans to meet on the measure later Tuesday.

Still, the measure leaves Democrats without one of their major demands: Foreign aid for Ukraine and Israel. And since this bill would punt the next funding deadline into January, it’s unclear how Congress and the White House can come to a deal that would deliver aid to either war-torn country before then. (Republicans did pass an Israel aid package, but one that was funded by cutting the Internal Revenue Service that stands no chance in the Senate.)

At their own internal meeting on Tuesday, Johnson and his GOP leadership team made the case for their shutdown-averting bill. The Louisiana Republican argued to fellow Republicans that this was the only path forward, given the reality of the House’s narrow margins and the nearly three weeks lost to the GOP’s speaker’s fight, according to people in the room. Still, Johnson took some heat from his right flank, including Freedom Caucus members like Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).

As of Tuesday morning, it’s not clear how many Republicans plan to support the bill.

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), one Republican who opposes the package, criticized the strategy as being willing to “acquiesce to the Senate.”

“I think we’re surrendering without putting up the appropriate fight,” Ogles said.

Jordain Carney and Olivia Beavers contributed.