The trial of Jeb Boasberg

OPINION:

Activist judges appointed by Democratic presidents have been playing hardball with the current administration. It’s time for the other side to stop playing T-ball and hold accountable the jurist who greenlit the most sweeping political sabotage operation in U.S. history.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, last week released another 1,730 pages from the FBI’s Arctic Frost case file, which kicked off a surveillance effort against nine members of Congress and 400 conservative organizations. U.S. District Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg signed the decree concealing the spy caper from Senate leadership.

The FBI launched Arctic Frost mere days after President Trump announced his 2024 White House comeback bid. Agents cited the Jan. 6 Capitol hubbub and the fact that Mr. Trump doubted the 2020 election results as a pretext to initiate a cloak-and-dagger scheme against his campaign and his supporters.

Material gathered under Arctic Frost was handed to “special counsel” Jack Smith. Mr. Smith widened the probe, fishing for any information that might bolster his pell-mell plot to imprison the Republican presidential candidate before the election. Mr. Smith was later found to have been illegally appointed.

AT&T was the only phone company that resisted Mr. Smith’s demand for constitutionally protected lawmaker records, but Judge Boasberg barred the Dallas-based firm from informing Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, that he was being targeted.

This order was illegal. Judge Boasberg, the Yale-educated appointee of President Obama, was aware that senators on both sides of the aisle were sore about past intrusions into the legislative branch’s privacy. Senators responded by inserting a provision into the 2020 government funding measure that prohibited judicial gag orders covering requests for official Senate phone and email records. The statute gives the Senate an opportunity to block law enforcement from peering into congressional data stored in third-party cloud services.

In May, Sen. Ron Wyden warned colleagues about a loophole. “Senators still remain in the dark about executive branch surveillance of their phone records, including location data. This is because it is common for Senators to use campaign phones, rather than Senate-issued phones, for all kinds of communications — including official business,” the Oregon Democrat wrote.

Even though Democrats are likely to circle the wagons to safeguard one of their favorite black-robed comrades, Republicans have a duty to stop this misconduct. Mr. Cruz is joined by Republican Sens. Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in calling for impeachment proceedings against Judge Boasberg.

Judge Boasberg deserves to be put in the spotlight. He jailed Jan. 6 defendants on absurd charges that were overturned by the Supreme Court. He issued the “turn the planes around” directive that sought to give illegal aliens a victory against Mr. Trump’s immigration enforcement. Let him explain why gang members who are citizens of another country are entitled to more due process than senators, a former president and a congressman.

If bugging a single Democratic office in the Watergate Building in the 1970s was the crime of the century, then abusing the government’s awesome surveillance powers to snoop on more than 400 offices, including 1 out of 5 Republican senators and a presidential candidate, qualifies as a high crime.

At the very least, the checks and balances of our system failed because Judge Boasberg failed. A full airing of the incident will expose just how easy it is for anyone with a badge to engage in warrantless espionage.

That must be rectified.