When it comes to orange trees with cold-weather hardiness, citrus reticulata is among the best. But if Latin isn’t your thing, you can simply remember the fruit of this tree by its more common name: Arctic Frost.
And now you know.
It’s unclear whether the same Obama-era hooligans who came up with Crossfire Hurricane and launched this Grand Conspiracy against Donald Trump also dreamed up Arctic Frost in April 2022, but Jack Smith and the boys were no doubt yukking it up when the FBI handed the investigation over to him and his henchmen. And what an investigation it became. What ostensibly began as a probe into the Trump campaign’s lawful submission of alternate electors to contest the rigged election of 2020 quickly expanded into a fishing expedition of what appears to be the entire Republican political apparatus.
“One-hundred and ninety-seven subpoenas were issued by Jack Smith and his team,” said Iowa’s amazing 92-year-old Chuck Grassley, who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee. “These subpoenas were issued to 34 individuals and 163 businesses, including financial institutions.”
Grassley continued: “The subpoena requested records and communications related to over 430 individuals and organizations — all of them appear to be aimed at Republicans.” One of those subpoenas, Grassley noted, went to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, and another went to the Republican Attorneys General Association.
Oh, and it swept up the phone records of nine Trump-allied Republican senators: Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, and Ted Cruz of Texas, in addition to GOP Congressman Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.
Here, you might wonder about the culpability of the phone companies. What about Verizon and AT&T? What did they do or not do to protect customer data and privacy? But get a load of the chilling warning nested within Jack Smith’s subpoena:
DISCLOSURE BY YOU OR ANYONE AFFILIATED WITH YOUR INSTITUTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF THIS SUBPOENA, OR THE ITEMS REQUESTED BY IT, MAY CONSTITUTE A CRIMINAL OFFENSE PUNISHABLE BY IMPRISONMENT FOR UP TO FIVE YEARS.
This seems like an encroachment on the carriers’ First Amendment rights, or perhaps their Fourth Amendment rights.
In any case, the unconstitutional hatchet man known as Jack Smith appears to be a latter-day version of Joseph Stalin’s infamous KGB chief, Lavrenti Beria. Beria’s contribution to due process is the following chilling quote: “Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime.”
If that quote doesn’t describe the unscrupulousness of Jack Smith, I don’t know what does. And now, through the magic of PDF, you yourself can peruse the 1,730 pages of Smith’s subpoena.
All this began with a flimsy predicate: that the Trump campaign’s submission of alternate electors in contesting the 2020 election was a criminal act, even though it had been done twice before — in 1876 and 1960 — both times by Democrats and both times without legal consequence. In terms of the dubious predicate, it’s of a piece with Crossfire Hurricane, and it shows that the Democrats are fully invested in lawfare as a political weapon.
Said one legal expert: “You cannot open an investigation on the pretense that you would like to spontaneously criminalize something that has historically, and by precedent, always been legal. That itself is illegal.” Said an incensed Senator Cruz: “Arctic Frost is Joe Biden’s Watergate. Merrick Garland was a fundamentally corrupt attorney general. Jack Smith was a fundamentally corrupt prosecutor. This was a political enemies list from the beginning.”
So what’s next? A congressional investigation seems in order. But much more than just that. The Crossfire Hurricane investigation was thoroughly discredited by the Durham Report, but as of today, no one has been held accountable. Yes, former FBI Director James Comey was recently indicted, and former CIA Director John Brennan has been referred to the DOJ by the House Judiciary Committee for criminal prosecution related to making false statements before Congress. But a slap on the wrist for these hooligans won’t cut it. Otherwise, the next wave of leftist lawfare practitioners will simply learn this lesson and do it again. And again. And again. And before you know it, we’ll wake up one day and realize that this Grand American Experiment is failing.
Criminal justice works best when the punishment meted out is both swift and severe. And we’ve already blown the “swift” part.
