According to the records released now by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and the House Judiciary Committee, The Biden era DOJ and special counsel Jack Smith drove an investigation that sprayed subpoenas like a firehose. There were 197 subpoenas sent to 34 people, over 160 businesses, and vacuumed up communications tied to more than 400 Republican individuals and entities. Fox News, Turning Point USA, OAN, all engulfed in what has been called "Operation Arctic Frost." And all this was predicated on NEWS CLIPS?! Glenn explains why this Arctic Frost is MUCH worse than Watergate.

Transcript

Below is a rush transcript that may contain errors

GLENN: While we're talking about winter, let's talk about Arctic Frost. That's the code name. And according to -- according to the records released now by senator chuck Grassley and the -- and the House Judiciary Committee. The Biden era DOJ and Special Counsel Jack Smith drove an investigation that sprayed subpoenas like a firehose. We now know, there were 197 subpoenas, spanning more than 1700 pages. Sent to 34 people. One hundred sixty-three businesses, and then vacuumed up communications, tied to more than 400 Republican individuals and entities.

Okay? That's reaching into everything. They reached into media companies. CBS, Fox, Fox Business, NewsMax, Sinclair, into financial institutions, into political organizations.

Even members, employees, and agents of the legislative branch. So now you have congressmen and senators being vacuumed up into this whole thing.

This is not a precision rifle shot. This is a net and a very big dragnet.

Okay? This is not the way justice in America works. You do not go after, you know, an entire party, 400 people? Now, what were they looking for? How did it start?

Well, let me say, the opening memo to justify Arctic Frost is to call -- does in legal terms, it would be called the predicate.

And it was stamped sensitive investigative matter, okay?

And it's cited. And I love this. Listen to this language. It's cited, evidence suggest a conspiracy around alternate electors.

I'll get to that here in just a second. But it -- it relied on -- leaned on news clips. News clips!

To vacuum all these people up, to get the -- to get the engine turning. News clips were used.

Suggesting, not proving. Suggesting, and it just rose up the ladder.

Ray, Garland, Monaco, even coordination with the White House counsel's office. It surfaces now in the record. This went all the way to the top.

This is not my language. This is what the documents now on the table imply.

Okay? Now, let me just pause for a minute, in the reading room of American memory. What is this all about?

Alternate electors. That's not a Martian invention. Okay?

That's not something completely foreign. We've seen it before. 1876, and 1960. They were messy. Contested. Deeply political moments that produced zero criminal prosecutions for their existence of rival slaves.

In fact, Al Gore, if he didn't set an alternate slate of electors, he was counseled, and I've talked to Dershowitz about this.

He said, they're counseled to have an alternate set of electors. Because once -- if you don't do that, and the tables turn and you're like, you know what, there was a problem -- if you haven't ceded those electors before a certain time, you have no case. You can't change anything. So it has to happen. And it has happened two times before, I think three, but definitely in 1876 and 1960.
In Hawaii, in 1916, Democrats signed certificates while a recount was still underway. The recount flipped. So it was ultimately certified. The democratic slate was certified. Ugly? Yes. But that's the way it worked.

It's not criminal. And history has said no. It's not criminal.

But it doesn't matter, when it's about Donald Trump. So let me go back to Arctic Frost thousand. As the subpoenas flew, the FBI reportedly snooped phone records of Republican members of Congress!

The scope widened to donor analytics. Broad financial data. Trump world advisers.

The lawyers. The media contacts. We said, during January 6, we said, internally, if you don't think they are going after a massive tree, because remember, this is -- this is what the Patriot Act allows you to do now.

You go after one person. If anybody is calling somebody else, well, that person now can be Hoovered up. And who has that person called?

So you can get pretty much everybody that you want, with one subpoena.

But that's not where they stop. They didn't stop with one subpoena. Okay?

When the state casts a dragnet over the opposition's political ecosystem with the authority to seize all their communications, compel testimony, and chill the donors, that's not tough politics.

Okay?

That is the government, with badges and grand juries, leaning its full weight into one side of the national scale.

Watergate. Please!

Watergate. Let me compare Watergate. You know what Watergate was?

Watergate was a gang of political operatives who broke into an office to get information. They weren't even. They weren't even losing the election. Nobody even knows why they would even do this. It is so stupid that they would even do this. But it was a local office. They broke in. They wanted to get some information that was there, you know, on the -- on the candidate and on the race.

And then they covered it up.

And they tried to keep the public from the truth.

It was wrong!

It was criminal.

And it forced a president to resign. And people went to prison over it. But Watergate was a private burglary, executed by a campaign, and covered up. By the White House.

Terrible!

Awful.

That's not the DOJ blanketing the opposing party's entire world, with federal subpoenas while citing news hits as the predicate.

Do you see the difference?

Watergate was an attempt to weaponize a campaign. Arctic Frost, if the emerging records hold, was the attempt to weaponize the entire state against a political party.

The difference there is the whole ball game. Under a constitutional republic.

You don't have a constitutional republic, if that's allowed to happen.

In America, the state is supposed to be the neutral referee. Not a sideline enforcer wearing one team's colors under the stripes.

And don't even start with me on, well, what about Donald Trump?

We'll play that game all day long. And you know where that gets us?

Nowhere. You want to make a charge against Donald Trump and what he's doing.

Good. Let's take that separately.

Let's do that. I'm willing to. Let's take that separately. Let's deal with this one, first. Okay? The moment the referee picks up the ball and starts running, the game is over!

It's not a fair game anymore. And if it can be done to them, today. It will be done to you, tomorrow.

That's not a slogan. That's a law of political gravity.

Yeah. But Trump did -- okay. Let's have that conversation.

But can we at least have it honestly?

Because if you think this is about, whataboutism. You believe so see the nose on the front of your face.

You're completely missing this.

You cannot make a weaponization of a government, a partisan inheritance that each side can claim when it holds power.

If any president, any prosecutor red, or blue, uses federal power to criminalize political opposition, rather than prosecute clear crimes.

It is an offense gets an equal protection under the law. So let's -- let's lay down a standard here, that I'm willing to apply to Donald Trump and to Joe Biden and any other president that comes our way. Because if we don't lay this clear standard down, we're done.

The predicate. Predication. It has to be real. Not rhetorical.

Evidence suggesting via TV interviews, is circular sourcing, at its best.

It's not something that you launch a sprawling investigation on into a presidential rival's universe. If you can't articulate the crime, specifically, you don't get to launch a dragnet on the people that are running against you!

The scope has to be narrow, and tied exactly to the alleged crime!

Not a sweep through media organizations, and donor records, and opposition infrastructure, under vague theories, that come from TV reports!

Journalism.

Political advocacy.

Fundraising.

All of those things are protected activities. Separation from the White House, also must be unmistakable. If the White House Counsel's office is coordinating device transfers into an investigation of its chief political rival, alarms should clang in every corridor of every main justice call hall.

Everywhere! The alarm -- the Claxton should be going off right now. Also, historic practice matters!

If prior episodes -- by the way, this was all thrown out by the Supreme Court. So you know. Okay? Nothing there.

If prior episodes, 1876, 1960, and I believe 2000. If they were treated as political, not criminal, especially where alternate electors were explicitly conditional, then you need compelling new legal theories and clean facts to criminalize it now.

You can't just say, yeah, well, history, never did anything about it before. And, actually, they said it was fine.

But now, now it's going to be a crime.

Wait. Can you be specific on what has changed? Well, we really just liked the people that are doing it this time. That doesn't count. That doesn't count.

Now, before anybody clips this monologue and screams, so Glenn Beck said, nobody -- the Trump administration did anything wrong. Well, I don't think so.

But that's not what I'm saying, because I'm not the judge. I'm not your juror. I'm the guy insisting that the rules are rules, and they should be applied to everyone on all sides.

Smith has his report. He says, he wants to tell his side. Great! Put him under oath. If he didn't do it, then he should be set free.

But it should be on a clear set of laws! What's happened in the Biden administration, they just kept changing laws. Well, yeah. I mean, the bank said there was no crime. But Donald Trump. And so all of a sudden, there was a crime.

Nobody has ever been prosecuted. Ever before that. Even the bank said, this is ridiculous.

There's no crime here.

It didn't matter.

That's not justice.

I want real justice. Smith says he has a side, let's hear it. Bring forward the memos. Publish the predicate. Let the country see where weather we had a criminal case or an election cycle dragnet. Because that's what it looks like. If the emerging picture looks like, if the Arctic Frost opened up on thin evidence, escalated on political pressure, and metastasized into a government-wide sweep of the sitting president's chief rival and his entire ecosystem, then this is not just like Watergate. This is much, much, much worse than Watergate. In kind.

Not just degree.

Watergate tried to steal the information. That's it. They potentially attempted to steal legitimacy to criminalize opposition by wielding the sword of the state.

That violates, you know, more than statutes. That violates our creed, that free men govern themselves by consent, and the process is sacred. And the law is the wall that even presidents and prosecutors can never climb over. If proven, the remedy is not a sternly, terse letter, or an op-ed, and a shrug.

The remedy is the full force of the law. Inspector general referrals. Special counsels where appropriate, prosecution where crimes are clear. Statutory reforms to bar this from ever happening again from -- from press clippings?

Being your predicate? Bright lines need to be drawn. Protections for the press, for donors, and legislators in political cases. Sunlight. All the sunlight on how this began, who approved it, and why no one in the administration said stop.

And to my friends saying, well, Trump is doing the same thing. I hear you. I don't agree with you, but I hear you. Why don't we codify the guardrails right now?

So when emotions are high and temptations are strong, the republic doesn't survive by trusting that our guys will be angels. It survives on the chains on power. Everyone's power.

You know, when I hold a founding sermon in your hand, when you read the ink of Washington scratched in the margin notes of James Madison. You discover that America's miracle wasn't that we selected saints. It's that we built a system where even the sinners are fenced in by law.

That's the process. When justice is blind, to banners and bumper stickers and political parties, that's when America is America. Arctic Frost. If the record stands, it took a blowtorch to that fence.

So the choice is really simple. Retreat into teams. Each side cheering for its prosecutors. And its dragnet. Or you can do the harder, nobler thing, just like our founders did. And insist that the same rules that bind all power, especially when it's aimed at people that we dislike, are enforced. That's how you keep a republic.

That's how you make sure that there's not a second Watergate. Because we learned the lesson the first time. But it we?

Because if we haven't. If we don't learn it this time, and by God, we are done!

The story of America is not a story of who got whom. It's a story of the people who refuse to let the government become a weapon. And if that spirit still lives in us, then this cold wind called Arctic Frost will pass. And the Constitution will withstand. Because you stood for equal justice. For due process. For truth. That doesn't bend to politics.

And that, that is how we relight the torch of America!