The Democrat-led House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol gathered a trove of phone data between Republicans and the first Trump White House without requiring a warrant, Just the News reported.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s partisan panel comprised of Democrats and two anti-Trump Republicans used congressional authority to collect about 30 million lines of phone data detailing communications between conservatives and the Trump White House, the outlet reported.
The massive surveillance archive of private call metadata was collected without warrants, sparking new civil liberty concerns.
The data later was offered to the FBI in late 2023 by former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., one of the GOP members of the committee.
Kinzinger reportedly made the offer just weeks before the 2024 presidential election, according to an FBI memo reviewed by Just the News.
President Donald Trump blasted the revelations on Truth Social just after midnight, posting, “So terrible!” with a link to the Just the News report.
The FBI memo stated Kinzinger told the bureau that former congressman and committee staffer Denver Riggleman had used congressional subpoenas to obtain “toll information” (phone record data) that included White House switchboard numbers.
Riggleman, a former Republican who later worked with Hunter Biden’s legal team, was said to have conducted the analysis linking various numbers to the White House.
The FBI document did not indicate whether the bureau accepted Kinzinger’s offer, but its existence revealed the sweeping scope of the Jan. 6 committee’s phone data collection efforts.
By December 2023, when Kinzinger approached the FBI, he had left Congress and the Jan. 6 committee had been dissolved for nearly a year.
The FBI memo recorded Kinzinger saying Riggleman might not have received direction on what to do with the roughly “30 million lines of data,” which he believed existed in electronic form.
Mike Davis, founder of the Article 3 Project, told Just the News the episode could test the constitutional limits of congressional immunity and whether the committee’s actions violated Americans’ civil rights.
Mike Howell, head of the conservative Oversight Project, called the data collection an “absolute violation of civil rights” and “a political mapping exercise to surveil their political opponents.”
The revelations follow reports that special counsel Jack Smith and the Biden-era FBI also collected private phone records from eight Republican senators and one GOP representative as part of an election-related investigation known as “Arctic Frost.”
The program reportedly examined phone metadata — such as call duration and locations — of lawmakers including Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the FBI’s actions amounted to political spying.
“This document shows the Biden FBI spied on eight of my Republican Senate colleagues,” Grassley said on X, calling it “worse than Watergate.”
Grassley accused the FBI under former President Joe Biden and former Director Christopher Wray of “exercising authority it did not have.”
The “Arctic Frost” probe later became part of Smith’s elector case against Trump.
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