CONSPIRARY THEORYThe Paranoid Style in American Oversight, Part I

By Michael Feinberg

In the face of various criminal indictments against Donald Trump, the president’s supporters—particularly his political appointees and those in Congress—have often constructed elaborate theories about government actors conspiring to handicap his political fortunes. Rather than accepting the most likely explanation that these charges may stem from actual illicit behavior, Trump allies have concocted conspiracies and fostered paranoia.

One particular strand of this conspiracy involves the FBI’s investigation into the 2020’s false electors scheme, code-named ARCTIC FROST. Nefarious accounts of the case’s origin and progress have been passed like purported samizdat among the more extreme and credulous corners of the conservative community for some time now. But few have proselytized with the frequency or volume of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Aided by documents provided by individuals he claims are whistleblowers, Grassley has put forward the argument that, but for the machinations of politically motivated personnel, the FBI would not have opened the investigation.

Although Grassley has publicly posted emails, draft case openings, interview write-ups, and other pages pulled from the ARCTIC FROST file and the bowels of the FBI’s information technology systems, what results is less a documentary record than a collection of random exhibits seemingly designed to impugn the integrity of individual FBI employees. The piecemeal and nonchronological manner in which many of these documents have been released, and the lack of necessary context, distorts the narrative of how ARCTIC FROST began.

Here, I provide an orderly road map to understanding exactly how ARCTIC FROST was opened. When the emails and internal documents on which the senator relies are rearranged in a chronological fashion, and compared to extant Justice Department and FBI policies—including ones enacted by Trump’s own appointees—a different story emerges. In this more organized telling, special agents and federal prosecutors did not take a single administrative or operational action without predication and justification, in any manner outside of normal practices, or with any sort of partisan motives. The tale it tells is not as full of Sturm und Drang as the one spun by Grassley, but it does have the modest advantage of being true. Due to the sheer amount of material surrounding the case, the corrective I offer to Grassley and his allies’ accounts will be split into three separate articles.