Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office obtained communications belonging to The Federalist and more than a dozen other news organizations while investigating President Trump.
The disclosure came from records the National Archives turned over after Smith’s team subpoenaed text messages from 87 phones used by officials during Trump’s first term. Grassley has referred to the broader effort as “Arctic Frost,” describing it as an operation that swept up communications belonging to members of Congress and journalists alike.
“What I can say today is that Smith also obtained communications from members of the media, to include: 60 Minutes, Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, LA Times, Mark Levin Show, Media Research Center, NBC, NPR, NY Magazine, Reuters, The Federalist, The Washington Post, Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal,” Grassley said.
Grassley said Smith subpoenaed “87 Trump White House phones, knowing they’d include communications with Members of Congress,” and accused Smith of failing to “filter out Speech or Debate privileged information, even though he and his team knew they’d scoop it up with their requests.”
The Constitution’s Speech or Debate clause bars the executive branch from targeting a lawmaker’s legislative work. Grassley said Smith’s staff were “aware of Speech or Debate concerns and targeting congressional toll records” and discussed internally “how they can circumvent the statutory barriers Congress put in place to obtain congressional toll records.” One message Grassley cited shows Smith deputy J.P. Cooney calling himself an “advocate for repealing the clause.”
Grassley also said that despite Smith’s stated focus on January 6, 2021, his team subpoenaed records stretching back years, gathering “information on Republican groups as early as 2019 and as late as 2023.”
“You see, that’s why you must do if your case is designed to map out and target the entire Republican Party,” Grassley said, adding later that “in the end, Smith indicted one person — President Trump — but successfully mapped out the Republican apparatus” — including members of the media.
The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland has described Arctic Frost as an operation built to “target Republicans in key battleground states,” and Grassley said Smith secretly obtained phone records belonging to several sitting senators as part of the same effort.
Federalist Response
The Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis said in a statement that the outlet is “still working to determine which of our reporters were targeted by Jack Smith and which journalistic communications he and his thugs seized.”
“The Federalist’s team of investigative reporters exposed the Russian collusion hoax. We exposed the Kavanaugh hoax. We exposed the Ukraine impeachment hoax. And The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway wrote the definitive account of how Democrats seized control of election infrastructure and destroyed the integrity of American elections in 2020,” Davis said.
“For over a decade, The Federalist has fearlessly exposed Deep State corruption and DOJ lies and lawfare. Spying on us was apparently part of Jack Smith’s plot to get revenge against us,” Davis said, adding that the outlet “will explore all legal options going forward to deal with Jack Smith’s lawless and un-American attempts to silence us by spying on us.”
