The House remains in recess and the Senate has now joined them after a brief but explosive week in Washington.
On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing with Jack Smith—the special prosecutor who led the Biden-era Justice Department’s unconstitutional investigation into conservative elected officials, organizations, media, and individuals—also known as Operation Arctic Frost.
Incredibly, Smith said the only conservative organization he could remember subpoenaing was CPI. Even more incredibly, Smith told the committee he’d do it all over again. His statements should shock any American who rightfully assumes that our Justice Department should operate according to the law instead of partisan politics.
The hearing—pointedly titled “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters”—was Chairman Chuck Grassley’s opportunity to reveal just how far Arctic Frost reached into American civic life. It went much further than most realized.
Members of Congress were surveilled. According to records Grassley has released over the past year, Smith’s team obtained toll records and call logs for more than a dozen sitting Republican lawmakers—including then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, and many more members of Congress. A House Judiciary staff report adds that investigators obtained text messages involving 44 members of Congress. The subpoenas were sought ex parte and accompanied by gag orders, so that the surveilled lawmakers had no way to know it was happening and therefore had no chance to object.
Journalists were caught in the net. At Tuesday’s hearing, Grassley revealed that Smith’s office obtained communications belonging to more than a dozen media organizations—one of which was The Federalist. The Federalist’s Sean Davis didn’t mince words. His team is still working to determine which of its reporters were targeted and what got swept up by Smith and “his thugs.” Also named were CBS, Fox News, Fox Business, Newsmax, and Sinclair. A Justice Department investigation is supposed to build a case against specific suspects for specific crimes—not rake up the phone records of the entire press corps covering the story.
Ordinary citizens’ finances were fair game, too. Grassley has now made public 197 grand jury subpoenas Smith’s team issued to banks, individuals, and businesses. They sought testimony, communications, and records tied to more than 430 Republicans. Thirty-four individuals and 163 businesses received subpoenas directly. The requests reached far past the offices of elected officials: broad financial data on conservative individuals and organizations, donor and fundraising analysis, and communications with White House advisors and campaign officials all appear in the haul. This wasn’t a narrow criminal inquiry. It was, in Grassley’s words, a “fishing expedition” across the entire Republican political ecosystem.
Even people inside Smith’s own operation are uneasy about what happened. Retired DOJ Inspector General agent Brian Burnett told House Judiciary Committee investigators he issued subpoenas for phone data without being told whose numbers he was actually chasing down—including, it turned out, Jim Jordan’s. He said he would have flagged the issue had he known.
And still, Smith sat before the Committee this week and refused to express a shred of doubt. He told senators he continues to stand by his decision to prosecute President Trump and that his team “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” of serious crimes. Sen. John Kennedy’s reaction captured what a lot of Americans are feeling right now: He told Smith bluntly that his testimony made him want to “throw up in my mouth.”
Ranking Member Dick Durbin had a different reaction. He argued Smith’s investigations were legitimate and accused his GOP colleagues of pushing “baseless conspiracy theories.” Smith himself maintains the records obtained were lawfully subpoenaed and relevant to a legitimate investigation.
That defense is getting harder to sustain as more documents emerge. Whatever one makes of the underlying prosecutions, the scope of the corruption revealed this week—congressional call logs, journalists’ communications, and the finances of hundreds of private citizens, all swept up under one investigation—is the kind of overreach a self-governing republic cannot treat as business as usual.
This story is far from over, and Compass will keep tracking it as more records surface.
ICYMI…
- Vice President Vance called out big tech companies’ abuse of H-1B visas to displace American workers: Read more in Fox News here.
- Catch OMB Director Russ Vought’s podcast with The American Mind here on how to control the administrative state.
- Read Brian Darling in The Hill: The National Debt Should Be the Number One Issue in This Year’s Election
- Read Claremont Institute President Ryan P. Williams’ response to a recent article criticizing Claremont and one of its top donors: What Claremont is For