The FBI under President Joe Biden investigated no less than 92 conservative or Republican groups and individuals, as part of an operation code-named, “Arctic Frost,” which scoured the dregs for a way to charge President Donald Trump with crimes related to the 2020 election, according to documents released Tuesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“In other words, Arctic Frost wasn’t just a case to politically investigate Trump,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. “It was the vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and DOJ [Department of Justice] prosecutors could achieve their partisan ends and improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus.”
The list included organs of the Republican Party, such as the Republican National Committee and the Republican Attorneys General Association; former Trump officials such as Mark Meadows; and nonprofit organizations focused on everything from policy to networking, such as America First Policy Institute, the Conservative Partnership Institute, and Turning Point USA.
The committee released its report less than a week after Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was shot dead while engaging in one of his characteristic political discussions with college students. The Biden administration’s surveillance against Kirk’s organization creates an unflattering parallel to the FBI surveillance authorized six decades earlier against Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Like Kirk, King was an influential Christian activist who was ultimately assassinated for his political views.
Biden administration surveillance could also descend from the grandiose to the provincial. U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyoming, said on “Washington Watch” that her own political consultant was placed under surveillance, at a time when Hageman was mounting a primary challenge to Trump-critical former congresswoman Liz Cheney, one of the few Republicans to join in the Biden administration’s attacks on Trump. What business did the FBI have investigating a political consultant to a Republican primary candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Wyoming—unless they were simply performing a favor for Cheney?
Begun in April 2022 and reassigned to Special Counsel Jack Smith in November of that year, the FBI investigation left no stone unturned, conducting more than 150 interviews, serving more than 400 subpoenas, and executing more than 60 search warrants (which included seizing the phones of five lawyers, a U.S. congressman, and two White House aides).
During the same period as this investigation, cartels freely trafficked drugs and people across America’s southern border, and left wing vandals attacked hundreds of pregnancy centers and churches with nearly no repercussions from the Biden administration.
Hageman alleged that Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee showed the same indifference toward actual crime during a Tuesday hearing with FBI director Kash Patel. “The Democrats are not interested in what the FBI is doing to actually keep the American citizens and the American public safe,” she said. “They talked an awful lot about [files related to Jeffrey] Epstein and focused on something that, for the majority of Americans, they’re not interested.”
This belated interest in Epstein betrays a political motivation, she argued, because Trump’s “is the first [administration] that has actually disclosed Epstein files. The Obama administration didn’t do it. The Biden administration didn’t do it. So they’re actually disclosing information. But that’s not good enough for the Democrats, because that’s not the point … of them going after this issue.” In other words, Democrats in Congress didn’t care about releasing the Epstein files until they believed it would hurt Trump.
That same politicized attitude towards law enforcement seemed to infuse the Biden administration’s campaign of lawfare against not only Trump but anyone they viewed as a political opponent. Thus, the FBI cultivated informants in traditional Catholic churches, investigated concerned parents as potential domestic terrorists for disagreeing with school board policies, and harassed a medical whistleblower and pro-life protestors with spurious prosecutions.
The recent revelations shed new light on one three-year-old case in particular. In August 2022, the DOJ used its intervention in a lawsuit against Alabama’s law protecting minors from gender transition procedures to subpoena a tiny, conservative nonprofit that wasn’t even a party to the case, demanding that its one-and-a-half paid employees turn over five years’ worth of records (a judge ultimately quashed the subpoena). At the time, the incident was a stunning abuse of authority. Now, it seems that such abuse of authority was standard operating procedure in the Biden administration’s FBI.
“This is what the Biden administration did,” Hageman asserted. “They used their own FBI … as almost a Gestapo against the Republican Party.”
The implications of the Biden administration’s subpoena dragnet extend beyond just the individuals and groups they targeted, argued Family Research Council president Tony Perkins. “It’s aptly named ‘Arctic Frost’ because it was intended to chill the freedom of speech,” to deter others from speaking into the political process. “Because we have seen the links of the FBI to groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and others on the Left,” he added, “I think there’s a whole lot more to be exposed.”
Originally published by The Washington Stand.
