The House and Senate Judiciary Committees released two separate troves of documents this week, each revealing a Biden-era FBI determined to investigate not just President Donald Trump but the vast majority of the conservative movement.
The Documents
The House Judiciary Committee released documents earlier this week provided by current FBI Director Kash Patel that showed dozens of Republican figures were wrapped up in what was known as the ‘Arctic Frost’ investigation.
The probe began as an examination of the alternate slates of electors Team Trump pushed in the 2020 election and developed into Special Counsel Jack Smith’s wider probe into interference around the 2020 election – a drag net that surveilled U.S. senators, financial institutions, basically GOP heavyweights having anything to do with Trump.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, meanwhile, made public whistleblower documents containing the actual subpoenas issued by Smith that targeted at least 430 Republican individuals and entities. Those included media companies like Fox and Newsmax, as well as Turning Point USA, Make America Great Again PAC, eight GOP senators, and private individuals.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley described the scrutiny as an FBI fishing expedition to “improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus.” That probe zeroed in on the GOP’s so-called ‘false electors scheme,’ a plan in which pro-Trump electors in several battleground states submitted alternate election certificates claiming Trump had won those states in hopes that they would be counted during the January 6 vote certification.
In the wake of the releases, Republican senators argued the latest revelations unveil a scandal as big as any in modern political history, likening it to “a political enemies list” and “100 times worse than Watergate.”
The Analysis
On Thursday’s AM Update, Sean Davis, CEO of The Federalist, joined to discuss the significance of these documents and what they reveal. He described Arctic Frost as a “wide-ranging, massive investigation basically against the entire national Republican Party infrastructure launched under the Joe Biden administration, namely under the authority of Special Counsel Jack Smith.”
While it “purported to be investigating January 6 and election interference,” Davis said “that was all really a pretext to create legal reasons to destroy the Biden administration’s entire political opposition in the country.”
The House Judiciary Committee documents contained the FBI information used to justify the investigation, while the Senate drop, provided by whistleblowers, contained 197 subpoenas and hundreds of pages of underlying documentation that Davis said “is starting to make clear the full breadth and insanity of this fishing expedition.”
As he explained, Smith and Biden Justice Department were “trying to find, and target, and burrow into, and learn every single possible thing about what every major figure in Republican politics was doing in the country.” That included who they were calling, who they were emailing, who they were doing business with, and even what their bank records looked like.
‘Bigger Than Watergate’
Davis echoed the senators who suggested this could turn out to be a bigger scandal than the one that forced President Richard Nixon to resign from office in 1974. “When we had Watergate, what we had was a scandal over a break-in by a handful of people of the Democrat Party headquarters, and they alleged that Nixon knew about it and tried to cover it up,” he explained. “But it was a one-time break-in of a party headquarters on one evening by a handful of people.”
Contrast that to Arctic Frost. “What we had here was a multi-year fishing expedition using the most powerful tools and weapons in the entire federal government against hundreds, if not thousands, of people, including the former and future president of the United States, all his aides, his campaign funders, the organizations that supported him. and the people who worked there,” Davis added. “It is bigger than Watergate in the same way that the Pacific Ocean is bigger than your bathtub.”
Necessary Consequences
Smith’s investigation into the electors scheme was ultimately rendered moot by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling recognizing presidential immunity for most official acts in office.
He said that decision did not happen a moment too soon. “They were demanding financial records from basically any name they could get, from anyone with any real major influence within the national Republican and conservative party infrastructure,” Davis noted. “They used it to go after alternate electors in places like Arizona or Georgia; they used it to go after lawyers… they used it to go after Donald Trump himself… they used it to go after conservative organizations like the Conservative Partnership Institute or American First Policy Institute; they even used it to go after a pillow company called MyPillow.”
He called the probe “an abomination” and said there should be consequences. “You cannot have this type of behavior go unpunished, so I very much hope that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, understands that the risk that not punishing these people poses to the future of the country,” Davis concluded. “Because you cannot have a country where one party is allowed to do this over and over and over again and nothing ever happens to them.”
You can get all the day’s headlines by tuning into the AM Update with Megyn Kelly on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch AM Update live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays at 8:45am ET.