Editorial: Arctic Frost is the biggest scandal you've never heard of

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Las Vegas Review-Journal on Nov 10, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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There’s significant evidence that the Biden administration engaged in a scandal on par with Watergate. Democrats hope you don’t notice.

At the end of last month, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley released almost 200 subpoenas from the FBI investigation “Arctic Frost.” Former special counsel Jack Smith and his team issued them during their investigation of President Donald Trump. Smith ended up charging Trump with mishandling classified documents and seeking to overturn the 2020 election. Both cases fizzled out after Trump won a second term.

The Biden administration has maintained that it had nothing to do with the multifaceted lawfare effort to kneecap Trump, but who believes that? And these documents show how far Smith went. The subpoenas involved 34 individuals and 163 companies. They sought testimony, information and communications on more than 400 Republican individuals and organizations.

“Arctic Frost was the vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors could improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus. Contrary to what (Jack) Smith has said publicly, this was clearly a fishing expedition,” Sen. Grassley said. “If this happened to the Democrats, they’d be as rightly outraged as we are.”

The scope of what happened is vast. “The corrupt Biden FBI subpoenaed the bank records, donor lists and emails of nearly every major conservative organization and leader in the country,” Federalist CEO Sean Davis wrote on X.

This wasn’t a prosecutor going rogue. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray personally approved opening the Arctic Frost investigation.

“Smith secretly obtained phone record data from at least eight senators and one congressman,” Sen. Grassley said. One of them was Ted Cruz. “Judge (James) Boasberg issued an order to AT&T and signed that order prohibiting AT&T from informing me of this subpoena for at least one year,” Sen. Cruz said.

Imagine the reaction if Attorney General Pam Bondi used a flimsy pretense to subpoena the phone records of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The outrage would be unending. Yet, aside from in conservative circles, this bombshell has received scant attention.

Democrats have spent years accusing Republicans of being a threat to democracy. That turns out to have been a case of projection. It’s not healthy that Trump has publicly sought to punish his enemies, and an endless tit-for-tat spiral risks a race to the bottom. But rather than panic over the current occupant of the White House, Democrats might first acknowledge their own penchant for lawfare.

Arctic Frost is far less infamous than Watergate, but at this point, it could turn into a much bigger scandal.