More than 160 Republicans, including current Trump administration officials, may have been investigated by the FBI under former President Joe Biden, as part of the bureau’s sweeping Arctic Frost probe, documents show.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, US Pardon Attorney Ed Martin and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro are among the prominent GOP figures named in FBI files released by the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, detailing the massive scope of the Biden-era Justice Department’s investigation into allegations of 2020 election interference.
“What we’ve learned is it was much broader, much more expansive, than we ever thought,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan told Fox News host Sean Hannity.
“This is why we want [former special counsel] Jack Smith in front of our committee in a deposition format,” Jordan (R-Ohio) continued.
“‘Was this a political operation you guys were running against President Trump? …. How many other members of Congress did you spy on?’ …. Those are the kind of questions we want to ask Jack Smith, to see what kind of answers we get from the guy who ran this whole operation,” the congressman added.
Former Attorney General Merrick Garland, ex-Assistant Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and former FBI Director Christopher Wray all signed off on the investigation into conservative groups and Trump allies in April of 2022, a memo released last week by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) showed.
The probe was handed over to Smith in November 2022, when he was named special counsel after Trump announced his 2024 White House run.
Smith later charged Trump with unlawfully hoarding national security documents and wrongly seeking to overturn the 2020 election results.
Many of the 198 pages of Arctic Frost documents released by the House Judiciary Committee are heavily redacted.
The documents show Arctic Frost investigators used FBI agents in several field offices – from Seattle to New York – to conduct interviews and undertake other investigatory steps.
Several requests to “surreptitiously record” interview subjects are also detailed in the documents.
One internal email shows investigators sought to expense $16,600 in travel in June 2022 alone “to conduct more than 40 interviews, serve subpoenas and issue several cellular device search warrants.”
Wild accusations alleging that Ed Corrigan, the president of the Conservative Partnership Institute and a longtime GOP Senate aide, is “pro-Putin” and “wants to build infrastructure to train people for civil war” were revealed in another email that appears to have been sent to the FBI’s Washington Field Office from an agent in Seattle.
“Corrigan secretly controls the freedom caucus and has plans that are not good for the FBI,” the Seattle-based FBI agent wrote, attributing the information to a redacted source. “Corrigan hates the FBI, who he refers to as spooks.”
Previously released Arctic Frost documents showed more than 90 conservative groups, including Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA nonprofit, were targeted in the probe.
Smith also received metadata from the phones of eight Republican senators and a GOP House member that would have allowed the special counsel to see who they called or texted as part of the Arctic Frost investigation.
The former special counsel has been asked to provide closed-door testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, but he has demanded a public hearing to address the “many mischaracterizations” of his two investigations into Trump.
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