00:00Do you remember Operation Arctic Frost? It was the Biden-era investigation led by Special
00:05Counsel Jack Smith that targeted hundreds of Republican individuals and groups after the
00:09January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Well, a new trove of internal DOJ records is shedding more light on
00:16how it all went down, specifically that hundreds of pages of FBI Director Cash Patel's phone records,
00:22credit card statements, and bank records were subpoenaed as part of the investigation long
00:27before he took his post at the Bureau. Now, this all led to a Senate hearing on Tuesday in a
00:32subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary, chaired by Chuck Grassley. The post's D.C. Bureau Chief Josh
00:37Christensen kept a close eye on the proceedings and gave me a summary of just what went down.
00:41The top of the hearing, Grassley noted that he had recently received emails and other documents
00:47showing that Smith's team had subpoenaed the records of Cash Patel when he was still a private citizen
00:54and years before he was nominated and later confirmed to lead the FBI. It also showed that
01:00Smith's team sought bank records from Patel in what had previously been reported by Reuters as
01:08something that had targeted Patel and the current White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles. These
01:15disclosures showed that Smith's investigation was far more expansive than was previously known to either
01:22lawmakers or members of the press. Many Republicans on a Senate Judiciary subcommittee drew attention to
01:31these disclosures as evidence that the Biden administration, particularly the Smith probe, had run afoul of
01:39constitutional protections for these lawmakers. Most notably, they drew attention to these being potential
01:46violations of the speech and debate clause by secretly subpoenaing these records from Patel, Wiles, and
01:53themselves. They made this argument because they were noting that the lawmakers had these phone records
02:02subpoenaed without their knowledge and were not, in fact, made aware of them until Grassley was presented
02:08with the information by whistleblowers. Each of the subpoenas had a non-disclosure order that was signed off
02:14by a federal judge keeping their contents hidden until they were unveiled and discussed during this hearing.
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