Show Notes
Sen Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) office released records showing that prosecutor Jack Smith had subpoenaed the phone call data from 8 Republican senators while he pursued a case against President Trump in 2022. Smith’s case began at the Biden Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under the codename “Arctic Frost.”
These were “administrative subpoenas,” notes Peter Schweizer, host of The Drill Down podcast, “which means they didn’t even go through a judge.” Smith’s investigation was into the so-called “fake electors” allegation, that after the 2020 election that he lost, Trump’s supporters were trying to create fake slates of electors from swing states to contest the Electoral College official vote count.
But the senators targeted by the subpoenas were not from swing states, except for Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Grassley and other Senate GOP members are livid about the revelation, which was obtained they said from a whistleblower and not through FBI cooperation. Grassley’s oversight committee is investigating FBI activities during the Biden administration, alleging that during the administration of President Joe Biden the bureau was being politically weaponized against Biden’s political enemies.
And up pops a familiar name to fans of The Drill Down podcast: Tim Thibault.
In 2022, Grassley had alleged that whistleblowers reported Thibault had sought to close “an avenue of additional derogatory Hunter Biden reporting” and sought to prevent it from being reopened. Thibault voluntarily retired shortly afterwards. Thibault’s fingerprints were also found on the Arctic Frost investigation, Grassley charged.
“Thibault’s the guy that initiated Arctic Frost. And here’s what I find so interesting about this, because we have a history with Tim Tebow,” says Peter Schweizer. “Tebow was very reluctant to investigate anything involving corruption by the Bidens or by the Clintons. He is the one that we now know that helped kill off the Clinton Foundation investigations in 2016. There were five field offices that were looking into it, and he killed that off.”
Not only that. “He actually worked very aggressively to effectively kill off the Biden corruption investigation,” Schweizer says. “I have reasons to believe based on a New York Times article that he outed me as somebody who had been a source for the FBI and the Biden corruption investigations.”
“Remember Tony Bobulinski? Remember the communications about ‘the Big Guy?’ He brought those to the FBI. And who did he bring them to? Tim Thibault. What did Thibault do? He didn’t share them with anybody at the FBI. He basically covered them up and the Hunter Biden laptop investigation,” Schweizer continues. “They got the laptop in late 2019. They commenced ‘analyzing’ the laptop in August of 2020. So, they waited nine or 10 months.”
“Here’s a guy who is not aggressive, who has shied away from investigating powerful people when they’re Democrats. Now comes Arctic Frost and this guy is like a hammer. He’s out there aggressively pushing this from the beginning, and he gets an assist from another familiar name…”
That would be Judge James Boesberg.
“We did a podcast on the effort to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members and the judge who has been working to block that effort,” Schweizer says. “When Jack Smith got the phone records, he had an assist from this judge, an Obama-appointed judge who not only did not stop Jack Smith from getting his phone records, but apparently in violation of some law says a gag order was in place so that the senators weren’t notified that their phone records were being given to the Department of Justice.”
“What’s going on here is you have a witch hunt,” Schweizer says.
All this has resurfaced because Republicans snuck a provision into the just-passed bill to reopen the government that allows those senators and congressmen whose phone records were seized by the FBI to sue for up to $500,000 per infraction. Democrats objected and tried unsuccessfully to strip the provision before reopening the government, but the Republicans prevailed. Most of the affected senators have said they either will not sue, or would give away any money awarded from such a suit.
That doesn’t impress Peter Schweizer. “This is the kind of crap that people get cynical about,” he says.
“I have no problem if you want to get justice, but you should not be getting rich by getting half million dollars because of these cases, especially when you consider that the (funding) bill was meant to reopen the government.”
Co-host Eric Eggers chimes in. “Not a good look.”
(Editor’s note: The House of Representatives voted late Wednesday to strip the lawsuit provision from the funding bill. The decision on whether to retain it now goes back to the Senate for reconsideration.)
