[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
This was not Watergate. It was a million times bigger.
The scope of the Biden administration’s ‘Arctic Frost’ investigation was so vast that it can only be described as an attempt to outlaw the entire conservative movement. Subpoenas from Jack Smith, a Clinton ally, targeted over 400 Republican and conservative figures and groups.
The scope of the targeting encompassed not only members of the Trump administration and campaign, but multiple conservative groups and figures who were not directly part of the election along with conservative media beginning with FOX News… but did not end there.
At the highest levels, the targets included 9 Republican senators, 1 in 5 members of the delegation, and included the use of secret surveillance. While the targets of the subpoenas were told to keep them secret or go to prison, secret phone record collection was also authorized against Sen. Ted Cruz and other members of the Republican senate delegation.
The pretext for giving the Biden administration permission to spy on a United States Senator was the entirely baseless claim that Sen. Cruz would ‘destroy evidence’ if he were made aware of it. The authorization for the government secretly targeting a Republican opposition official came from Judge James Boasberg: a FISA court judge who had protected Russiagate fraud.
“If a judge signs an order reaching a factual conclusion for which there is zero evidence whatsoever, that judge is abusing his power. I am right now calling on the House of Representatives to impeach Judge Boasberg,” Sen. Ted Cruz said, accusing him of authorizing the surveillance based on the belief that disclosing the surveillance would ”result in destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses and serious jeopardy to the investigation” for which no evidence of any kind actually existed.
“We don’t know that for a fact, but I feel confident that he concluded it’s likely that Lindsey Graham would destroy evidence and Marsha Blackburn would destroy evidence, and Eric Schmitt would destroy evidence, and Chuck Grassley would destroy evidence,” he argued.
Boasberg, an Obama judge who heads the D.C. District Court, had recently become notorious for his vast overreaches of power, claiming jurisdiction over illegal alien gang members being held for deportation in New York and Texas, and even over gang members in foreign countries who had already been deported, at one point commanding orally that “any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States” and then trying to hold the Department of Justice in contempt for not obeying him.
Since Chief Justice Roberts named Boasberg to the FISA court in 2014, just in time for Boasberg to get his feet under him before the Obama administration began abusing the intel surveillance system to spy on Trump and the political opposition, he has been at the center of the Democrat abuse of national security tools to go after Republicans and conservatives.
Boasberg had signed off on the initial phase of Russiagate surveillance based on the Steele dossier, manufactured by the Clinton campaign, during which the FBI made false statements to the FISA court. FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith, who was caught altering an email, went on trial in front of Judge Boasberg. Boasberg let Clinesmith off with probation because, among other reasons, the FISA warrant was so bad that the altered email would not have changed anything.
That was less of an argument for letting off Clinesmith than for indicting the entire FISA court.
After presiding over parts of Obama’s version of Watergate, Judge Boasberg then gave his full approval to Biden’s Watergate, allowing the administration and its allies to secretly spy on likely multiple senators under the pretext that they would be likely to break the law if they were told.
Watergate led to vocal calls for Nixon’s resignation of impeachment. Nixon eventually resigned.
But Judge James Boasberg, who did far worse than Nixon had been accused of doing, is still here. Judge Boasberg has been at the center of illegal government surveillance of political opponents going back nearly a decade. What began with outrageous but small-scale surveillance based on the pretext of fighting operations by foreign intelligence agencies turned into the unapologetic spying on top opposition officials in the name of “protecting democracy” which really meant protecting Democrats.
The approval for opening the ‘investigation’ known as ‘Arctic Frost’ was based on “open source reporting” much as Russiagate was based on the Steele dossier being laundered through the media. There were never any legal grounds for even a basic investigation, let alone a secretive one that entangled dozens of people and over a hundred organizations, targeting communications, bank records and anything that could be swept up in this Orwellian frenzy.
Only for Jack Smith to then emerge with an indictment of Trump based on the blatant misuse of law that had been put into place to bar KKK members from wearing masks on highways.
The officials responsible for this travesty in the Obama and Biden administrations, the ‘investigators’ who propped up this dangerous sham, and those men and women in the FBI offices who took part in this blatantly unconstitutional witch hunt should be held accountable, but it’s also past time to deal with the federal judges, especially the FISA court judges, who took an institution meant to ensure that surveillance authority wouldn’t be abused and turned it into a clearinghouse for authorizing every Democrat spying expedition against Republicans.
Judge James Boasberg has become the public face of an abuse of power that makes Watergate seem like a child’s prank. Washington D.C. and its courts and institutions are at the center of political power. D.C. Federal judges like Boasberg have not only taken part in a judicial coup against the Trump administration by blocking every administration policy they could, but Boasberg signed off on an operation aimed at investigating, crippling and jailing the opposition.
There must be consequences for that. Call it an urgent need to, “protect democracy”.
Calls to hold federal district court judges for their abuses have been echoing for some time now from prominent figures, but Boasberg’s case is the most extreme example of what a federal judge has been allowed to get away with. If a Democrat judge signing off on a secret spying effort on Republicans by his fellow Democrats isn’t impeachable conduct… then what is?
