One of the Republican lawmakers targeted by the FBI during the previous administration is preparing to take several Biden officials to court, including Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by former Attorney General Merrick Garland on dubious legal grounds.
“There is absolutely nothing ‘proper’ about spying on your political opponents to further your own radical agenda,” Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn noted on X. “This is further proof Jack Smith must be fully investigated and held accountable as soon as possible.”
‘These guys just hated Donald Trump, and they hated us because we supported Donald Trump.’
Earlier this month, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) published damning documents from 2023 indicating that the FBI under the Biden administration obtained private cellphone records from Blackburn and eight other Republican lawmakers during its Arctic Frost operation — an investigation that ultimately morphed into Smith’s federal case against President Donald Trump regarding the 2020 election.
After a briefing by FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino on the alleged surveillance scheme — which Grassley said was worse than Watergate — Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, one of the eight GOP senators targeted, said that “we were surveilled simply for being Republicans.”
Bongino indicated that the FBI obtained call logs from the affected GOP lawmakers’ phone carriers for the period of Jan. 4 to Jan. 7, 2021. Smith ultimately used and disclosed the records in his 2024 indictment of President Donald Trump.
There now appears to be a reckoning under way.
For starters, the FBI has canned several agents involved in Operation Arctic Frost and opened an internal investigation.
Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Rep. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma and other Republican lawmakers have called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to open a criminal probe into Smith.
“The Biden administration used Operation Arctic Frost to target its political opponents by authorizing covert surveillance on elected members of the Republican Party,” Brecheen told Blaze News last week. “We cannot let the Biden administration and special counsel Jack Smith get away with this direct violation of the Constitution.”
Meanwhile, Grassley has written to four telecommunications companies and five federal entities demanding answers about precisely which records were turned over to Smith as part of his elector case against Trump, noting that “there are serious constitutional questions that those communications are still subject to constitutional protections.”
Lawyers for Jack Smith, Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski, tried their best in a Tuesday letter to Grassley to spin the apparent surveillance of elected officials as benign and “lawful” data collection.
‘I can assure you this, we will be suing the Biden DOJ, Jack Smith, and his CR-15 team.’
“A number of people have falsely stated that Mr. Smith ‘tapped’ senators’ phones, ‘spied’ on their communications, or ‘surveilled’ their conversations,” the lawyers wrote, according to the New York Times. “Toll records are historical in nature, and do not include the content of calls. Wiretapping, by contrast, involves intercepting the telecommunications in real time, which the special counsel’s office did not do.”
The lawyers further characterized the covert effort to find out who the Republican lawmakers were speaking to and when as “entirely proper, lawful, and consistent with established Department of Justice policy” and claimed that Smith was authorized to seek the records by the Biden Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section.
Breuer and Koski apparently engaged in some mental gymnastics to play off the alleged surveillance scheme as business as usual, comparing it to two instances where the targets were themselves under criminal investigation, namely former President Joe Biden during the classified documents probe and former Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.), who was convicted on bribery charges.
“Mr. Smith’s use of the toll records as Special Counsel was lawful and in accordance with normal investigative procedure,” wrote Smith’s lawyers.
Upon receipt of the letter, Grassley wrote on X, “SMELLS LIKE POLITICS.”
Blackburn told Just the News that she will be suing Biden DOJ and FBI officials who targeted her, Smith in particular.
The senator suggested that the 2023 grand jury subpoena of phone records violated her First and Fourth Amendment protections of free speech and privacy; her separation of powers protection as a senator; and potentially the Stored Communications Act because Verizon, her telecommunications carrier, allegedly turned over information pertaining to where she was when she made calls.
“We know that they pulled what is called the toll data, that is every call we either made or received, the duration of the call, the individual and the number that it was to and from, and then also the physical location where we were when that call was either made or received,” said Blackburn.
“I can assure you this, we will be suing the Biden DOJ, Jack Smith, and his CR-15 team, which, of course, has already been fired by [FBI Director] Kash Patel, thank goodness,” noted the senator. “These guys just hated Donald Trump, and they hated us because we supported Donald Trump and we were standing with Donald Trump.”
In addition to wanting to take Smith to court, Blackburn has expressed an interest in seeing the former special counsel disbarred.
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