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.
We already knew that the phone records of some lawmakers were seized in Smith’s probe, because the Justice Department had to overcome legal hurdles posed by the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. And it’s difficult to understand how Smith ever could have conducted such a probe without obtaining some phone records of lawmakers. That’s because Trump’s pressure on lawmakers was a key part of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. … It would seem very difficult to piece together a case without understanding who was talking to whom, and when. MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian emphasized a related point, noting that the former special counsel’s final report, released earlier this year, made note of these same toll records. Plenty of other independent observers drew a similar conclusion. “It actually seems sort of obvious that if you’re investigating a former president of the United States for trying to subvert an election, you’d probe some of contacts he and alleged co-conspirators had with people he was trying to enlist/pressure to overturn the results,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted. Of course, we know how the coming days, weeks, months and years will unfold. It will now be a simple “fact” that the FBI was caught “spying” on congressional Republicans and “tapping” their phones as part of a nefarious plot — a claim that will be repeated ad nauseum in conservative media. (For more on how this model of rewriting history works, see my second book.) But barring additional revelations, that “fact” won’t be true.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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