Exclusive: House Republican seeks criminal investigation into Jack Smith’s alleged surveillance scheme

Since former DOJ special counsel Jack Smith’s alleged surveillance scheme surfaced earlier this month, House Republicans are leading the charge to bring justice.

Republican Rep. Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, a member of the Republican Study Committee, urged Attorney General Pam Bondi to open a criminal investigation into Smith for his apparent involvement with Operation Arctic Frost, according to a letter obtained by Blaze News. During former President Joe Biden’s administration, the FBI obtained private cellphone information from nine Republican lawmakers, an internal document indicated, in what appears to be an ideologically motivated instance of government weaponization.

‘Weaponizing the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency to spy on political opponents is what we expect from authoritarian regimes.’

Brecheen’s call for an investigation is also in accordance with President Donald Trump’s executive order entitled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” which Trump signed the same day he was inaugurated.

Since the scandal broke, the FBI has opened an internal investigation, firing several agents who were involved in the operation. As of this writing, the Department of Justice has not yet opened a criminal investigation, leading Brecheen and his co-signatories to be the first federal group to call for a criminal investigation into the operation.

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“The Biden administration used Operation Arctic Frost to target its political opponents by authorizing covert surveillance on elected members of the Republican Party,” Brecheen told Blaze News. “We cannot let the Biden administration and special counsel Jack Smith get away with this direct violation of the Constitution.”

Many prominent lawmakers, including Brecheen, have characterized the scandal as a modern-day Watergate, according to the letter obtained exclusively by Blaze News. Brecheen also warned that if high-profile politicians can have their privacy violated for ideological purposes, ordinary Americans could too.

‘The Bureau could easily be directed against individual citizens.’

“The revelation that the Biden Administration directed the FBI to surveil duly elected American lawmakers is indeed a scandal of magnitude our country has not seen since Watergate,” the letter reads. “Let us be clear: weaponizing the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency to spy on political opponents is what we expect from authoritarian regimes such as North Korea or Iran, not the United States.”

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“The ramifications of this unprecedented scandal, however, stretch far beyond the lawmakers who were surveilled,” the letter reads. “By empowering federal agents to secretly monitor the private phone calls of sitting United States Senators, Jack Smith set the sinister precedent that the same form of covert surveillance can and will be deployed against law-abiding American citizens.”

“If the FBI could be so readily weaponized against powerful figures in our government, then it is not difficult to conclude that the Bureau could easily be directed against individual citizens.”

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