OVERSIGHTThe Paranoid Style in American Oversight, Part II
The criticism of the techniques used in the FBI’s investigation of the false electors plot, much like the critiques of how it was opened, do not bear scrutiny. The days of the FBI trying to speak only through indictments are apparently over, and Director Kash Patel’s willingness to endlessly provide piecemeal documents, without any explanation, annotation, or context to the bureau’s most vituperative critics is just one more sign not that a page has merely been turned, but that it has been ripped out of the book entirely and burned to cinders.
Editor’s note: Read “The Paranoid Style in American Oversight, Part I,” here.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has never concealed his distaste at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department’s attempt to hold Donald Trump accountable for his failed coup, an investigation code-named by the FBI as ARCTIC FROST. Beginning as a case managed out of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, it was moved to Jack Smith’s Special Counsel’s Office upon his appointment, and was closed, with the associated indictment dismissed, upon Trump’s second ascension to the presidency.
Grassley has never tempered his language when vilifying ARCTIC FROST personnel: His website contains dozens of web pages heaping criticism on the original assistant special agent in charge over the matter. The fusillade began in May 2022 and has continued throughout this year, even though the official resigned in August 2022. While the senator’s crusade in this matter was never particularly lonely, so long as Christopher Wray remained the FBI’s director, Grassley could only base his accusations on leaked documents provided by purported whistleblowers. But once Kash Patel and Dan Bongino claimed the highest ranks of the bureau, the senator’s endeavors soon found succor in released documents provided by the new Director Patel (all helpfully posted online by Rep. Jim Jordan [R-Ohio]), and vaguely worded innuendos from the deputy director. Now lower level investigators receive a treatment similar in tone, if not frequency, as that leveraged by Grassley against their former assistant special agent in charge.
According to Grassley, the entire investigation “was the vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and Department of Justice prosecutors could achieve their partisan ends.” Jordan was not as concise, instead launching into a 10-minute paranoid fantasia to make a similar allegation, somehow tying together the Steele dossier, the Mueller report, the two impeachment efforts, the Fulton County prosecution, the Jan. 6 hearings, the classified documents investigation in Mar-a-Lago, Jack Smith’s gag order during the false elector prosecution, big tech, academia, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the federal bureaucracy—all in an effort to paint the nation’s premier law enforcement agency as little more than political commissars drunk on power. Say what one will about the congressman from Ohio, but he can certainly weave a tangled web out of the flimsiest of silk.
