OPINION:
President Biden put a target on Charlie Kirk’s back. Knowing this, Democrats and their media allies deflect criticism by calling President Trump an authoritarian. Yet nothing the current president has done comes close to Scranton Joe’s unleashing the FBI to destroy the Republican Party by any means necessary.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley revealed the alarming scope of the FBI dragnet dubbed Arctic Frost. In 2022, the initiative placed at least 92 prominent conservative organizations in the crosshairs, including Mr. Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and Turning Point USA, according to the newly released FBI memo.
“Arctic Frost wasn’t just a case to politically investigate Trump. It was a vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and Department of Justice prosecutors could achieve their partisan ends and improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus,” the Iowa Republican said in a congressional hearing last week.
Mr. Grassley credited whistleblowers with uncovering the program earlier this year despite efforts by the bureau’s previous leaders to conceal it. In Senate committee testimony, FBI Director Kash Patel explained that he discovered an off-the-books storage room containing “a plethora of hard drives, computers, hard documents, soft documents that were not so recorded” to shield dubious activities from public and congressional scrutiny.
“We are reviewing those materials,” the top G-man said. “A lot of those materials are related to ongoing investigations. And … we are, on a rolling basis, providing Congress the documents that we can. And we will continue to do so.”
Arctic Frost relied on the thinnest of pretexts to go after the Republicans’ key operatives. The FBI memo justified action by citing supposed crimes such as the filings of “false lawsuits” related to the 2020 election and the “Eastman Plan,” which refers to constitutional lawyer John Eastman’s advice regarding the vice president’s role under the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887.
Although law enforcement officials can disagree with Mr. Eastman’s reasoning, they have no business criminalizing a scholarly opinion or the seeking of redress in the courts. After reviewing the list of banks that were searched, Mr. Eastman found he didn’t have active accounts with most of them.
“The remaining include the institution where the only account I have is my kids 529 education accounts. In other words, this was demonstrably a classic fishing expedition that could not possibly have been based on probable cause. Outrageous. The people who did this need to be held accountable,” he wrote on X.
Agents working under the cover of Arctic Frost conducted 150 interviews, served 400 subpoenas and snooped on the phones of five lawyers, one congressman, two White House staffers and Mr. Trump’s Twitter account.
The search warrant compelled the social media company to provide “all searches performed by the subject account,” “all location information” and “all users who have followed” Mr. Trump while he was president, dragging ordinary Americans into the inquiry.
Dirt so gathered was handed to a special counsel who carefully timed his indictments to coincide with the 2024 presidential campaign. The ambitious gambit backfired, and Mr. Trump’s popularity soared. The public was repulsed by the naked use of government power to silence a political opponent, tie him up in courtrooms and even have him thrown off the ballot.
Mr. Patel ought to speed up the disclosure of materials in the FBI’s secret document stash. We must understand what happened four years ago to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
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