by Steven Richards
Newly-disclosed records show that the FBI twice subpoenaed future Director Kash Patel’s personal data while he was a private citizen in a probe that swept up hundreds of Trump allies, including then-future Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
Newly released records in the Senate investigation into the weaponization of government raise questions about whether the FBI went on a fishing expedition targeting Trump advisors who were never charged with crimes and whether Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prior testimony to Congress was truthful.
The documents were made public by Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, before a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing into alleged abuses by the Biden-era FBI and Justice Department in their investigations into then ex-president Donald Trump before and during the 2024 presidential election during its probe code-named “Arctic Frost.” Just the News previously reported that Biden's FBI paid anti-Trump 'Sedition Hunters' as informants in the Arctic Frost probes.
“If Watergate taught us anything, it is that even a single abuse of power carried out by a handful of individuals can shake the foundations of our Republic,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., Chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights.
Cruz: “It is a modern Watergate"
“What we confront today, the Biden administration's Arctic Frost scheme, is not a single act,” he continued in his opening remarks. “It is a modern Watergate trading a break-in at one office for a digital sweep into approximately 100,000 private communications, more than a dozen senators and 1000s of individuals lives.”
Cruz said that ultimately, “just like Watergate,” the judges, FBI and Justice Department officials involved should be “investigated, tried, impeached, and brought to justice.”
The scope of Smith’s probe, which centered on Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election results and the events of January 6, 2021, was truly expansive. Grassley previously released records showing that Smith's office issued nearly 200 subpoenas in his sweeping Arctic Frost-linked case, secretly seeking records on more than 400 Republican personalities and groups. This included more than 160 Republicans–many closely connected to Trump.
The Arctic Frost was one of four separate probes that targeted Trump and his allies stretching from summer 2016 to January 2025. The other probes were code-named Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, and Plasmic Echo, Just the News reported earlier this month.
As FBI Director, Patel has personally led the effort to review those probes, uncovering evidence of a far-reaching dragnet that in some cases may have been predicated on false, misleading or uncorroborated justifications, officials previously told Just the News.
FBI secretly snooped on Patel's emails, phone call records, and banking info while still a private citizen
The newly-disclosed records show that the FBI ordered two sweeping subpoenas of FBI Director Kash Patel’s phone records, while he was a private citizen in Trump’s orbit. Each subpoena covered an approximately two-year time frame.
The FBI’s requests for information included demands for highly personal data of Patel's, including Patel’s addresses (“mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, and e-mail addresses”), a “call detail record” which lists inbound and outbound calls, text messages and voicemail messages, as well as sources of payment for the phone service, including credit card and bank account numbers. The FBI also demanded expansive internet session data including exact IP addresses, the document shows.
The FBI also sought–and was granted–non-disclosure orders (NDOs) from federal judges, shielding the existence of the subpoenas from Patel and his lawyers on the grounds that revealing them could result in his “flight from prosecution, destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses and serious jeopardy to the investigation.”
You can read the documents released by Sen. Grassley below:
Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s then campaign manager and future chief of staff, was also targeted in the probe. The Biden-era FBI reportedly even went so far as to record a private phone call between Wiles and her lawyer in 2023 while she was actively managing the campaign of President Joe Biden’s chief political rival, according to Reuters.
The FBI reportedly maintains that the recording was justified on the pretense that her defense lawyer had consented to the recording. However, Wiles’ lawyer issued a statement adamantly denying he ever consented to such monitoring, raising the possibility false representations were made to a court for phone monitoring and the now infamous stage-managed raid on Mar-a-Lago.
"If I ever pulled a stunt like that, I wouldn’t – and shouldn’t – have a license to practice law," an unidentified lawyer told Axios. "I’m as shocked as Susie."
While the term wiretap was widely used in media in recent weeks to describe the monitoring of Wiles, Just the News has not been able to confirm such a wiretap occurred.
Legal expert Will Chamberlain, the General Counsel of The Article III Project, an anti-lawfare advocacy group, testified to the subcommittee that the recording was an invasion of Wiles’ interests in two ways, the wiretap if it was employed generally and the breaching of attorney client privilege. It is possible that the recording was, therefore, illegal.
Sen. Grassley also raised questions about Special Counsel Smith’s prior testimony and claims about his investigation, indicating the possibility that he misled Congress. It has not been determined if Patel, Grassley, or anyone else has made a referral to the Department of Justice for criminal action.
Section 1001 of Title 18 of the United States Code, outlaws material false statements in matters within the jurisdiction of a federal agency or department. It reaches false statements in federal courts and federal grand jury sessions, as well as congressional hearings and administrative matters. Under § 1001, a statement is a crime if it is false, regardless of whether it is made under oath.
Smith did not respond to a request for comment sent to his law firm by publication time.
According to briefing materials that Grassley said Smith’s office likely prepared for then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, Smith’s team “went over [the House January 6 report] page by page” and “had a methodical process for logging information contained in the report.”
However, in his Special Counsel Report at the conclusion of his tenure, Smith stated his investigation “included consideration of the [House] report” but that “[t]hose materials comprised a small part of the Office’s investigative record.”
The records also show that Smith’s office was fully aware of both the effort to obtain congressional communications and of the potential constitutional implications of spying on a co-equal branch of government.
“To quote from the emails we’re making public today, ‘Before we tell Main [as in main Justice], we’re going to fire off subpoenas for so many members tolls I should make sure Jack’s aware,” Grassley said in his opening statement. “Another record states that it’s ‘unlikely that many of those members will cooperate with our investigation.’”
Grassley continued, “The same record also says the members likely have a valid Speech or Debate privilege immunizing them from compelled testimony.”
Steven Richards
Source: https://justthenews.com/government/congress/fishing-expedition-new-docs-lay-bare-expansive-fbi-surveillance-targeting-trump
No comments:
Post a Comment