The breadth of the Biden administration‘s efforts to spy on its political opponents is only now coming into view, and the picture is alarming. The Justice Department must conduct a full investigation into how such invasive and improper steps were allowed to be taken to snoop on political actors, and those responsible must be held accountable.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) released hundreds of pages of documents in October made up of 197 subpoenas sent to 34 people and 163 businesses demanding information about more than 400 Republicans and entities, some of which did not even exist at the time of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, which was the incident on which the investigation was predicated.
Those contacted included cellphone companies, banks, and media companies, such as Fox News, for cellphone communications data, banking records, and emails. People targeted included not only prominent figures such as Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, and Lara Trump, but also organizations such as the Republican National Committee and the Republican Attorneys General Association, as well as activists like Ed Corrigan and groups such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and the Conservative Partnership Institute.
Revelations about this unbridled investigation come after documents released by Grassley in October showed that the same FBI investigators tracked personal communications of eight Republican senators, including Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).
“Arctic Frost [the code name of the investigation] was the vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors could improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus,” Grassley said in a statement accompanying the documents. “Contrary to what [Jack] Smith has said publicly, this was clearly a fishing expedition. If this happened to the Democrats, they’d be as rightly outraged as we are.”
Later, at a press conference, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said, “Arctic Frost is Joe Biden’s Watergate. This was an absolute and egregious abuse of power.”
The events of Jan. 6 were shocking. The FBI had a responsibility to comb through video of the day, find everyone who trespassed on the Capitol’s grounds or assaulted law enforcement officers, and prosecute them. But after those investigations ended, former President Joe Biden’s DOJ had not found the smoking gun it had hoped to find connecting President Donald Trump to the violence.
That is why Timothy Thibault, the assistant FBI special agent in charge, opened Arctic Frost to manufacture a conspiracy case against Trump that would prevent him from running in the 2024 election. Once the political decision was made to search for evidence of conspiracy against not just Trump but everyone with any connection to him, Democrats weaponized the DOJ on a historic scale. Cruz is right, President Richard Nixon never used the federal government to surveil his political opponents as thoroughly as the Biden administration did.
BILL GATES GETS REAL ON CLIMATE AND LEAVES THE LEFT BEHIND
The Jan. 6 riot left a deep psychological scar on Washington’s political class, especially among Democrats, who came to see it not as a riot but as an existential threat to America’s democracy. They rationalized intrusive measures they would not have contemplated before, weaponizing the FBI and DOJ against political opponents under the guise of justice. Trump has always presented a unique challenge both politically and legally. His conduct often brushes past the boundaries of precedent and reason, and he should not have pardoned people convicted of violence on Jan. 6. But that does not excuse what the Democrats did.
The Constitution does not bend to emotion, and the trauma of one day cannot justify years of unlawful surveillance and political retribution, which is what the Democrats’ response to Jan. 6 has been. The Arctic Frost operation crossed a line no administration should cross. By transforming legitimate law enforcement into a partisan dragnet, the Biden DOJ undermined the principles it claimed to defend. The DOJ now owes the nation a full and detailed accounting of who authorized this unlawful spying, how it was excused and on what grounds, and why it was allowed to metastasize into an attack on half the country. Accountability is the only path back to trust.