In recent years, Republican officials and their allies have searched high and low for evidence implicating the Biden-era FBI in political wrongdoing, and to date, the GOP hasn’t had much luck. This week, however, the party claimed to have finally succeeded.
On Monday, a group of congressional Republicans claimed that the FBI analyzed the personal cellphone data of nine GOP lawmakers as part of the probe into the Jan. 6 attack. NBC News reported:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, shared a one-page, unclassified document that he said shows that the cellphone ‘tolling data’ of Republican lawmakers was sought and obtained in 2023 as part of the FBI’s ‘Arctic Frost’ investigation — a precursor of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into efforts by President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results.
According to the document released by the Iowa Republican, the analysis included eight GOP senators — Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, Tennessee’s Bill Hagerty, Missouri’s Josh Hawley, Alaska’s Dan Sullivan, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, Wyoming’s Cynthia Lummis and Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn — as well as Republican Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.
The day after the claims reached the public, Grassley declared that the controversy was “worse than Watergate,” while Hawley spent much of the day claiming that his phone had been “tapped” by the FBI. (He was lying.)
Not surprisingly, Donald Trump joined the partisan parade soon after. “Wow! Jack Smith and the Biden DOJ spied on Republican Senators and a least one Republican Congressman,” the president wrote online on Tuesday night. “This is really bad ‘stuff.’ They tried to take down the Republican Party, and got caught!!!”
Based on the available information, the truth is far more anodyne.
The New York Times reported, “The analysis of phone toll records is a common investigative tactic. … Such toll record information does not include the contents of conversations, which would require a court-approved wiretap.”
A related analysis from CNN explained that there’s nothing especially surprising about any of this.








