Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
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Arctic Frost was the worst abuse of power by a presidential administration in the last 75 years.
It easily exceeded not only Watergate, but even the Obama era which had pioneered the practice of spying on opposing members of Congress under the guise of conducting counterintelligence operations, first against Israel and then Russia, climaxing in ‘Russiagate’.
The Biden administration discarded the ‘foreign’ pretext and began treating political opponents as ‘threats to democracy’ and the Jack Smith witch hunt not only targeted President Trump, but cast a net so wide that its Arctic Frost campaign deployed 197 subpoenas that hit 400 Republican targets including conservative organizations and even members of Congress.
After the first wave of revelations that 10 members of Congress, including 9 senators, had their call logs secretly seized with the complicity of partisan Democrat judges, Sen. Ted Cruz called for the impeachment of Judge James Boasberg. In his defense, Jack Smith, a Hillary Clinton ally acting as an ‘independent special counsel’ at the behest of the Biden administration, had his lawyers put out a statement claiming that, “the toll data collection was narrowly tailored and limited to the four days from January 4, 2021 to January 7, 2021” focusing on “the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol”.
We now know that’s not true.
Former Rep. Louie Gohmert, who was a sitting member of Congress at the time, had his cell phone records subpoenaed not just for “four days”, but for three months. As of now, this is the most extensive known spying on any of the members of Congress targeted in Arctic Frost.
The shocking revelation that a member of Congress had been spied on for three months, well beyond four days in January, makes it all too apparent that like Russia, J6 was a pretext for a wide-ranging campaign to spy on and prosecute as many Republicans and conservatives as possible.
Rep. Louie Gohmer, currently a senior fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, had emerged as the most outspoken congressional opponent of the abuses that occurred before and after the 2020 election, urging Republicans to look into election fraud and taking part in a lawsuit challenging the election results, and had likely been targeted as payback.
The representative from Texas had also been a passionate defender of some of the men and women arrested in the so-called ‘J6’ incident and Smith may have been hoping to silence him.
Gohmert had been targeted alongside Speaker Kevin McCarthy, but neither man’s name even appears in Jack Smith’s final report to the Biden administration making it clear that Smith had no grounds for spying on Gohmert and learned nothing that he was able to include in the report.
So why did Smith set out to conduct such an extensive search of Rep. Gohmert’s records?
The purpose of Smith’s fishing expedition clearly went beyond anything that could be included in the report. And further demonstrates that Arctic Frost was a domestic spy operation against the opposition whose scope went far beyond anything needed for the J6 investigation.
Three months would have covered not only January, but the election and its entire aftermath.
Jack Smith made the demands for Gohmert’s records shortly after he first returned to the United States from Europe and fired off a series of secret requests to phone companies, financial institutions and social media platforms including Twitter or X. The secrecy of the requests was first made public when X sued over the ‘nondisclosure’ part which barred the company from informing users that their communications were being seized by the Democrat investigator.
The targeting of members of the Congress makes it clear that part of the reason for the secrecy was to cover up the Biden administration’s own Watergate. X challenged the secret targeting, but none of the phone companies who were told to hand over information from members of Congress chose to challenge this totalitarian assault on the privacy of their customers.
Verizon has claimed that it had no choice, but X shows that the telecommunications giant had a choice. It just made the wrong one. So did judges like Judge James Boasberg who signed off on secret spying on members of Congress under the pretext that they would cover up evidence.
It’s not enough to only hold Smith, FBI personnel and DOJ officials involved in Arctic Frost accountable without also scrutinizing the judges who enabled Biden’s Watergate.
“Does Congress Need to Impeach Judges to Make Them Behave?” Former Rep. Louie Gohmert asked in a Front Page Magazine article this year.
Rep. Gohmert noted that Article III Section 1 of the Constitution states that “The Judges, both of the supreme & inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior” and suggested “that it might be a good idea to bring judges in before the Judiciary Committee to ask them about matters in which a judge may have violated the ‘good behaviour’ standard.”
Could there be a better case for Congress holding federal judges accountable than spying on its own members at the behest of the opposing ruling party?
That’s why the David Horowitz Freedom Center is working on a Judicial Accountability Project, assembling abuses by federal district judges and working to hold them accountable.
Rep. Louie Gohmert has since retired from Congress and serves as a senior fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an advisor to its Judicial Accountability Project.
