Hearings to examine Arctic Frost.

I hereby call to order this hearing, Arctic Frost: A Modern Watergate. Fifty years ago, Watergate exposed a simple but profound abuse of power. Operatives tied to a sitting president broke into a building to secretly gather information from their political opponents by bugging offices and seizing documents. And what followed was just as troubling. Efforts to use the powers of government to conceal it, to pressure investigators, to shut down inquiries, to avoid accountability. Even though that operation failed in its ultimate objective, the American people did not treat it lightly. The consequences were swift and severe. The President of the United States resigned in disgrace, facing near certain impeachment. And dozens of officials, more than 40 individuals connected to the scheme, were indicted or jailed because the attempt itself was the offense. In our law, we recognize a simple truth: a failed crime is not an insignificant one. A man who pulls the trigger and misses is no less guilty than the one who hits his mark. The intent is the same, the danger is the same, and the crime is the same. And if Watergate taught us anything, it is that even a single abuse of power carried out by a handful of individuals can shake the foundations of our republic. But what we confront today, the Biden administration's Arctic Frost scheme, is not a single act. It is a modern Watergate, trading a break-in at one office for a digital sweep into approximately 100,000 private communications, more than a dozen senators, and thousands of individuals' lives. But even that comparison falls short. It is something far broader, an operation that aligned Democrats across all three branches of government. The Biden executive branch through DOJ and the FBI, wielding investigative power against political opponents. Democrat-appointed judges in the judiciary through warrants, secrecy orders, and deference, failing to serve as a meaningful check. And members of the legislative branch who should be the first line of oversight, choosing instead to look the other way. And just like Watergate, these officials deserve to be investigated, tried, impeached, and brought to justice. So let's examine how this operation was carried out step-by-step. In early 2022, senior leadership within the Biden Department of Justice made the decision to open an investigation targeting President Trump and his campaign apparatus. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and FBI Director Chris Wray all personally approved the opening of the investigation. On April 4, 2022, they signed a confidential memo with each of their signatures. That fact matters because Watergate was carried out in secret by operatives who were not brazen enough to act with formal written authorization from the highest levels of the Department of Justice. Arctic Frost was fully authorized, formalized, and executed through the official powers of the United States government by partisan Democrats. Then, in the fall, came the nearly 200 subpoenas. We're talking about information pertaining to hundreds of entities and individuals. Over 400 Republican-aligned groups and individuals, including the most sensitive categories of personal data, gathered, retained, and in some accounts shared across offices. Watergate was about a handful of files in a single office. This reached into tens of thousands of private communications: emails, records, and personal data; toll records, bank records, donor lists, law firm records, and other personal files relating to every major conservative organization were subpoenaed. Who were the targets of this? Donald Trump's campaign, the RNC, the Conservative Partnership Institute, Save America PAC, America First Policy Institute, and even MyPillow, because God knows we have a national security threat from rogue pillows threatening our country. Watergate broke into an office. Arctic Frost reached into the private lives of thousands of Americans. Meanwhile, conservative leaders found themselves equally violated. The Biden administration sought the phone records of nearly 20 percent of the Republicans in the Senate, including multiple members of the committee, including myself. Without our knowledge, the FBI took the cell phone data of nearly 20 percent of the Republicans in the Senate, including information about with whom we were talking, how long we were talking, and from where we were calling. Toll records are not trivial. They are a map of your life, giving insight into your relationships, your movements, your patterns. Such invasive subpoenas were granted by Judge Boasberg, a Democrat-appointed judge, on the premise that any one of us, or to be clear, all of us as duly elected United States senators, would destroy evidence, tamper with witnesses, or obstruct justice. And Judge Boasberg signed those orders like he was printing the menu at a Denny's, one after the other, facts be damned, every member of the Senate is likely to destroy evidence. Such invasive subpoenas are an abuse of power. Recently, even more troubling facts continue to emerge. Biden's Department of Justice subpoenaed the toll records of now FBI Director Kash Patel and now White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. They were not aiming low. They were trying to take out everyone on the other side. Both were at the time private citizens and key members of President Trump's 2024 election campaign. Now imagine the reverse. Imagine for just one moment that President Trump's Department of Justice had secretly obtained the phone records of Senator Schumer, and Senator Whitehouse, and Senator Durbin, Senator Hirono, and Senator Padilla. My Democrat colleagues would be losing their minds right now in this hearing if the Trump Department of Justice had done that. Imagine if a Republican Attorney General or Republican FBI Director and a Republican-appointed judge had all signed off on a covert effort to sweep up the communications, locations, data, and call history of every Democrat-affiliated organization and individual in the United States. Imagine if a judge, a Republican-appointed judge, signed an order that said Senator Durbin will destroy evidence if he is aware of this subpoena, because that's what this judge did. Would anyone in this hearing room call that routine? Would Democrats call that normal law enforcement activity? Would the press shrug its shoulders? Of course not. There would be wall-to-wall coverage, there would be cries of authoritarianism, there would be emergency hearings, demands for resignations, and talk of impeachment before the sun went down. Instead, my Democrat colleagues can barely get their heart rate above 60 beats per minute. Arctic Frost is the culmination of a gross pattern of abuse by Democrats for partisan ends to elect and re-elect a Democrat president. In 2016, Obama's FBI began spying on the Trump campaign just a month before election day. In 2020, Biden's FBI met with Senators Johnson and Grassley in an effort to throw off their investigation into the now infamous Hunter Biden laptop, calling the laptop disinformation, a claim we now know was false. The FBI went to the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and lied to him in an effort to change the outcome of a presidential election. Democrats for years have exhibited the pattern of abusing public law enforcement powers for the sake of politics, a pattern this committee under the leadership of Chairman Grassley is now working to uncover and expose. Because no administration, Republican or Democrat, has any business turning the surveillance powers of the federal government against its political opposition. Fifty years ago, this nation was confronted with an abuse of power, and it responded not with indifference but with accountability. And I'll tell you one of the big differences of Watergate versus Arctic Frost. When Richard Nixon and his corrupt Attorney General and his corrupt administration abused their law enforcement powers to go after their political opponents, Republican senators stood up to the president of their own party and defended the rule of law. Where is even a single Democrat senator who has said one word about this abuse of power? Is there not one? There are 47 Democrats in this body. Is there not one who can come forward and say, you know what, turning the Department of Justice into the oppo research and attack machine of the DNC is not what the DOJ is supposed to be? We were tested then, and there was accountability. We are being tested again now. The question is really simple: will we uphold the same standard, will we defend the rule of law, or will we abandon it? Ranking Member Whitehouse.