Why did the FBI spy on Republican Senators?

The United States Senate Judiciary Committee this week revealed that Joe Biden’s FBI spied on eight Republican Senators and a Republican House of Representative Member in 2023. The underlying FBI record reveals the agency sought telephone tolling data as part of the Arctic Frost investigation that Special Counsel Jack Smith used to concoct an election fraud case against President Donald J. Trump. Although the indictment was ultimately dismissed when the President was re-elected in 2024, Smith expended the resources of the federal government for two years investigating the President in search of a federal crime.

The data revealed the telephone numbers the elected officials called, the dates of the calls and the duration of the calls made by Senator Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), Senator Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Senator Bill Hagerty (Tennessee), Senator Josh Hawley (Missouri), Senator Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Senator Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Senator Dan Sullivan (Alaska), Senator Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) and Representative Mike Kelly (Pennsylvania) in the wake of the 2020 election.

Senator Chuck Grassley commented, “Based on the evidence to-date, Arctic Frost and related weaponization by federal law enforcement under Biden was arguably worse than Watergate.”

More than egregiously unjust, the latest revelation shows just how deep the rot penetrated during the Biden years. During its long and occasionally ignoble history, the FBI has spied on everyone from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Elvis Presley, but tracking the communications of sitting United States Senators might be a new low.

Smith’s indictment charged the President with obstructing the election certification process on January 6, 2021, a process in which the aforenoted Senators were actively involved under a process governed by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. All Republicans, all MAGA and all Trump supporters, none of the Senators was previously known to have been targeted by law enforcement. One can only surmise Smith was contemplating an indictment in which those Senators, and perhaps others, would have been charged as conspiratorial co-defendants along with President Trump.

It is difficult to envision a world in which Joe Biden, his Attorney General and his FBI Director were unaware of these escapades by Bureau agents. It is more baffling still to fathom how any of those longtime public officials could possibly think the eventual eruption of the FBI’s insidious investigations would cause anything less than a counter-revolution, which is precisely what we are seeing unfold at this moment. Thus, the predicate evidence for procuring something as serious as a citizen’s telephone records should have been substantial. At this moment, no purported justification has been disclosed, let alone substantiated.

The FBI has some difficult questions to answer, and forthwith. Just what was the agency fishing for in 2021, and why? Who authorized the requests for the tolling data? How far up the chain of command at the FBI, DOJ and White House did the knowledge, authorization and directives go? What was the basis for targeting these individual Senators and Representatives? What particular crime in the federal criminal code did the FBI think the people’s duly elected representatives had committed to justify such a gross invasion of their privacy? Significantly, did the agency learn anything from its failed scorched earth campaign against President Trump and his allies? If so, what is the FBI doing to ensure abuses of this nature are not repeated?

FBI Director Kash Patel, whose plate is already full, needs to empower a massive clean up crew to repair the institutional damage done by his predecessors. The Senate should, and the President will, fully support him as he gets to the bottom of how it all went so wrong.