Unfortunately for the many good agents and employees doing their jobs well and upholding their oaths, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a long history of corruption and shady investigations. It didn’t start or end with the FBI’s efforts against Donald Trump, beginning during the 2016 campaign.
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the FBI launched a probe of nearly 100 Republican and conservative groups, including Turning Point USA, the organization co-founded in 2012 by the late Charlie Kirk.
We know this thanks to two Republican senators — Iowa’s Chuck Grassley and Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. Earlier this week, they published a tranche of files related to the probe, codenamed “Arctic Frost,” which was begun in April 2022 before being turned over to Special Counsel Jack Smith in November of that year.
“Arctic Frost was much broader than just an electoral matter,” Grassley said, because it “expanded to Republican organizations.” He explained:
In total, 92 Republican targets, including Republican groups and Republican-linked individuals, were placed under the investigative scope of Arctic Frost. On that political list was one of Charlie Kirk’s groups, Turning Point USA. In other words, Arctic Frost wasn’t just a case to politically investigate Trump. It was the vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors could achieve their partisan ends and improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus.
In short, after the FBI hamstrung the early years of Trump’s first term, followed by Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, the FBI expanded its efforts to include scores of organizations that fought to get to the bottom of what happened in the 2020 presidential election or had even the most tangential connection to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. That, in turn, blew up into Smith’s probe, which was a thinly veiled attempt to lend legitimacy to the Democrats’ lawfare against Trump.
Was there any evidence of criminal wrongdoing that might justify investigating 92 conservative organizations? It’s easy to imagine that someone somewhere didn’t dot an i or cross a t, and some efforts to ferret out fraud crossed the lines of propriety, if not legality.
Yet the message is clear: Elements within the FBI were exercising partisan lawfare against Donald Trump and his supporters.
This reminds me of two things from history: The IRS Tea Party scandal and the FBI’s surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr.
First, the IRS under Barack Obama essentially created an “enemies list” of Tea Party and Patriot organizations that were targeted for audit or delays in tax-exempt approval. As Mark Alexander detailed regarding that case, “Needless to say, Barack Obama and his black-bag dirty tricks team learned well from their Democrat predecessors, FDR, JFK and Clinton, how to use the Internal Revenue Service to harass their opponents. But they also learned a few things from Richard Nixon about the importance of using cutouts.” Cutouts are essentially surrogates who know what to do to avoid implicating those they’re doing it for. Alexander added, “Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment after being caught on tape discussing the Watergate burglary with key staffers, where today those staffers would never directly discuss such abuse of power with a sitting president.”
There almost surely wasn’t an email, text, or phone call from Obama to Lois Lerner, the golden-parachute recipient who led the IRS’s probes, telling her what to do to target his political opponents. But he didn’t have to “order the code red.” She knew what to do.
The same could be said of the FBI under Obama and then Joe Biden. Former Director James Comey and the agents who shared his political persuasion knew exactly how to make life difficult for Trump and his associates. It’s a deep state problem — unelected bureaucrats at various levels who are unaccountable to voters but who are highly motivated partisan actors.
Second, back in July, the Trump administration released 240,000 pages of records regarding FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. In 1977, a court put a seal on those records, and his family opposed the release. “He was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover,” King’s children said in a statement. “The intent of the government’s COINTELPRO campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement.”
My point isn’t to litigate King’s case against the FBI. It’s to say that the FBI, for at least some political reasons, targeted Martin Luther King and Charlie Kirk.
That is among the reasons why King’s assassination is the closest thing I can think of to Kirk’s in its impact and consequences. The comparison isn’t precise for many reasons, of course, but both were men of faith who led major movements and recruited many Americans to join them. MLK worked for civil rights for blacks. Kirk fought for free speech rights for conservatives.
They were both shot to death in their 30s precisely because of what they stood for.
Make of that what you will.
Democrats and left-wingers everywhere may soon regret the long-running precedents they have set. Trump just designated antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. When Vice President JD Vance guest hosted Kirk’s podcast on Monday, he promised a crackdown on left-wing groups “promoting violence.”
Trump and his administration, for better or worse, have shown they aren’t afraid to beat Democrats at their own game. And hoo boy, they can’t stand it.
