n 1972, a small team of operatives connected to President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign broke into the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate complex to install listening devices. To this day, there is no conclusive evidence that Nixon personally ordered — or even knew of — the break-in beforehand. Yet Watergate shaped American political consciousness for decades. It gave the world a permanent suffix for scandal and became the ultimate symbol of abuse of power, a crisis so severe that it culminated in the only resignation of a U.S. president to preempt removal from office.
Fast forward 50 years, and what has come to light under the Biden administration dwarfs the clumsy efforts of Nixon’s campaign operatives. According to a newly released document from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the FBI secretly monitored the phone records of at least eight sitting Republican senators. While the bureau is said not to have accessed the content of the conversations, it could see who was called, when the calls were made, how long they lasted, and even the location data.
The ostensible justification was special counsel Jack Smith’s phony investigation into whether President Donald Trump sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election — a claim that has no connection to these senators and provides no legal basis for examining their communications, especially since their phone records were sought three years after the election and two months after Trump had already been indicted for allegedly trying to overturn it. The entire operation was a flagrantly abusive fishing expedition carried out with total impunity. The internal FBI document confirming the bureau’s actions was then buried in a secret “prohibited access” file, where it was recently unearthed by FBI Director Kash Patel.
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