Doc Shows Garland, Wray All Over Corrupt ‘Arctic Frost’

The fingerprints of top deep-staters in President Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Justice are all over the launch of the corrupt “Arctic Frost” investigation, according to a document just dropped by Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

“Just received this doc frm DOJ Proof that Biden Atty General Merrick Garland+ Deputy Atty General Lisa Monaco+ FBI Dir Chris Wray all PERSONALLY APPROVED opening Arctic Frost,” the Iowa Republican wrote Thursday afternoon on X. 

“This investigation unleashed unchecked govt power at the highest levels. My oversight will continue,” Grassley added. 

‘Your Approval Is Requested’

The document is initialed by the DOJ’s top generals, unleashing Arctic Frost, the flimsy FBI probe that led to politically conflicted Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election lawfare campaign against President Donald Trump. The political witch hunt aimed to take down the Democrats’ biggest political threat in advance of the 2024 election. 

Dated April 4, 2022, the Memorandum for Attorney General Garland from Wray and through Monaco is an urgent request asking Garland to sign off on the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) opening a full sensitive investigative matter (SIM) into Trump, his campaign, and allies on allegations that they attempted to overthrow the 2020 election. The memo provided very thin detail and basis to open a criminal case that appears to have trampled all over the rights of Republican groups and individuals, including Trump and members of Congress. 

“Your approval is requested as soon as possible,” the memo alerted Garland. “Due to the nature of the SIM at issue and pursuant to DOJ guidance, WFO may not open this full investigation without your authorization.” It appears Garland, blocked by Republicans for the Supreme Court justice seat he coveted, was more than happy to sign off. 

In an executive summary, the memo rehashes the Democrats’ Jan. 6, 2020, insurrection conspiracy theory, claiming that the Trump campaign’s legal strategy to present alternate electors from seven swing states where legal challenges over the election were ongoing proved an “apparent effort to obstruct Congress’s certification of the Electoral College.” 

“Open source reporting and public statements made by individuals closely associated with Donald J Trump, Inc. (Trump Campaign ) present, an articuable factual basis, indicating the existence of a federal crime, and thus the FBI seeks to open a full investigation,” the memo insists. 

The only reason the corrupt Washington Field Office asked Garland to sign off is that a February 2020 DOJ memo required top approval to open sensitive investigative matters. That has something to do with rogue operators in the FBI and the intelligence community allied with the Democrats showing their willingness to launch bogus political probes against Trump — like the Russia collusion hoax and the Russiagate soft coup intelligence assessment that launched it. 

‘A Political Weapon’

“Merrick, I recommend you approve,” Monaco appears to have scribbled at the bottom of the memo on April 5, 2022. 

Of course she did. If you recall, the politically driven deputy attorney general served as President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security and counterterrorism adviser. Monaco was “a key figure behind the Trump and Jan. 6 prosecutions,” as Hans Mahncke noted in these pages. She announced Obama’s call for a “full review” of what her deep-state pals were describing as a Russian hacking activity tied to the 2016 election, a predicate for the leak of the infamous Steele dossier and the Russia collusion hoax. 

“The president has directed the intelligence community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process,” Monaco told reporters at a Dec. 9, 2016, event. 

As Mahncke reported in The Federalist, Obama’s ordered “review” was the politically corrupted Intelligence Community Assessment, which “was never a neutral inquiry. It was a political weapon, designed to retroactively manufacture a conclusion that directly contradicted the intelligence community’s own findings, as laid out in the Dec. 8 PDB.”

‘It Should Come as No Surprise’

The latest shocking DOJ document unearthed by Grassley’s team follows on the heels of the senator’s release earlier this month of records showing the Biden FBI targeted the personal cell phone data of nine Republican lawmakers — eight senators and a representative — as part of the 2022-launched “Arctic Frost” operation. FBI officials sought and obtained “tolling data,” data about the senators’ phone calls between Jan. 4 and Jan. 7, 2021. As Grassley’s release noted, “That data shows when and to whom a call is made, as well as the duration and general location data of the call. The data does not include the content of the call.”

“Based on the evidence to-date, Arctic Frost and related weaponization by federal law enforcement under Biden was arguably worse than Watergate,” Grassley said in a statement. 

Previous Arctic Frost documents released by Grassley and Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., show officials in the Biden White House “personally assisted the FBI” in grabbing Trump’s and former Vice President Mike Pence’s government phones. Grassley’s investigative team also discovered records showing Wray’s FBI placed nearly 100 “Republican-linked individuals and Republican groups — such as Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA — under Arctic Frost’s investigative scope.”

Attorneys for Smith have defended the disgraced special counsel’s actions as “entirely lawful, proper and consistent with established Department of Justice policy.”

Johnson, one of the eight Republican senators whom federal investigators spied on, has a different interpretation of the weaponized DOJ that unleashed the political probe. 

“It is interesting to note who was aware of and approved the fishing expedition initiated by FBI Director Christopher Wray, supported by Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and approved by Attorney General Merrick Garland,” the Wisconsin senator told The Federalist Thursday. “It should come as no surprise that these are some of the same partisan actors who have sullied the FBI and DOJ and done such egregious harm to our country.”

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.