Episode 5316: Arctic Frost And Getting To The Bottom Of 2020 Election
Jeff Clark testifies at Arctic Frost, exposing a 2022 FBI dragnet targeting 420 individuals across six states that merged an OIG probe into a criminal case against President Trump. He details personal harassment, including home raids and death threats, while arguing the investigation weaponized law enforcement to silence political opponents. The episode also features Will Hollingsworth opposing Ohio data centers over water usage, followed by Joe Allen's critique of Alex Karp and Palantir as a "gray tribe" building a surveillance state. Ultimately, the segment frames these events as coordinated attacks on conservative figures and American sovereignty through both legal overreach and corporate surveillance. [Automatically generated summary]
Seizing communications at the highest levels of the government, pointing a criminal case dagger at President Trump that was all designed to destroy the populist Republican Party.
I was in its crosshairs.
Let me be clear this testimony is not about my support for Republicans.
It is about whether the machinery of government was used in a way that would alarm every American, regardless of party.
And it was.
First, what was Arctic Frost?
It was an investigation launched in 2022 under circumstances that flatly violated.
FBI protocol and all ethical standards allowing a politically biased agent to open his own case.
That's not adequate predication.
From there, it expanded dramatically, reaching into six states, targeting roughly 420 individuals and entities, even sweeping in the phone records of sitting United States senators.
This was not a narrow law enforcement operation to keep Americans safe, it was a political dragnet.
Second, my experience.
I expressed internal views within the Department of Justice about the 2020 election through proper channels, in privileged settings, as part of my official duties as a lawyer and consistent with my Rule 2.1 obligations in DC.
For that, I became the subject of biased New York Times leaks, overlapping investigations, an inspector general probe, later merged into Arctic Frost, a bar referral, a congressional investigation, a federal investigation, and a failed state prosecution.
These were not isolated, they overlapped.
They reinforced one another and they imposed immense personal and professional costs.
At one point, my home was raided.
My family's devices were seized.
My daughter, who was 12 years old at the time, 12 years old, came to me nearly in tears after she learned about the raid and said that her personal diary was that read by the agent's dad?
You don't want to have to explain that to your 12 year old.
I received death threats.
One from a caller claiming to be from New Jersey invited me to go to the Pine Barrens.
Where he said he would dismember me and then send the pieces in buckets to my fatherless family.
We reported this to the FBI and we never heard back.
That is the insane hyperpartisan atmosphere that Arctic Frost stoked.
Third, the pattern, the same conduct, all internal privileged DOJ communications, in my case, were simultaneously probed by multiple bodies.
On five fronts, the same facts, the same target, all me, all designed to impose tectonic pressure.
That would try to make me say something and lie about President Trump, which I refused to do.
I stood strong.
Documents already in the public record and that I've attached to my more extensive written testimony show direct coordination such as information sharing, multi state meetings with state prosecutors, overlapping witnesses, clever attempted evasions of important legal privileges, and miraculous purported coincidences like the Office of Inspector General and the FBI raiding my house.
One day, June 22nd, and then the very next day, magically, the January 6th committee had a hearing targeted at me.
I wonder how that happened.
Fourth, the implications of the fruit plucked from this poisonous tree from FBI agent Thibault.
If an investigation is launched improperly, then what follows is tainted.
If internal watchdog materials are merged into criminal probes, as happened here with the OIG investigation that morphed into Arctic Frost, You've violated what the Inspector General's office is designed to do.
And now it's conflicted, and now it cannot look at DOJ's own conduct in that investigation.
Fifth, the broader context.
Arctic Frost did not occur in isolation.
It fits within a pattern of Biden auto pen wielders suspending investigative, I'm sorry, expanding investigative powers against political opponents using lower thresholds, broader definitions of threat, and increasing coordination across institutions.
Even the religious rights of Americans were no barrier to the Biden DOJ and FBI.
They weaponized against Catholic Latin mass goers, calling them potential violent extremists.
They weaponized against conscientious abortion protesters who were pro life.
It didn't matter to them.
The leftist orthodoxy had to be cowtowed to.
This committee has to ask the question where are the limits and what should they be?
And I think you need to expose on the record all of the Arctic Frost documents as Senator Grassley has been doing, as Chair Grassley has been doing, so that the American people understand the multi state, multi agency, all of government as.
Chair Schmidt indicated that was weaponized against President Biden and any of his allies.
Mr. Clark, I want to ask you you've been, you've referenced the, you being targeted not just by Arctic Frost, but in Fulton County, multiple proceedings.
In that proceeding in Fulton County specifically, you and your lawyers sought documents, communications, including Nathan Wade's billing entries for his conference with White House counsel, interview with D.C. White House, but Judge McAfee placed certain materials reviewed in camera under seal.
Why are those, could you explain to the committee why are those sealed communications so important?
Look, we don't know what's in the communications until we see them.
You know, we obviously called for them.
We think we have a right to show them.
And we think part of the correspondence showed that the Justice Department did not give what's called TUI authorizations to Fonnie Willis so that she could put witnesses from the Justice Department in front of the grand jury.
And we posed the obvious question of, If she can't produce any witnesses from the Justice Department against me, then how could she possibly proceed with their case?
We think the judge erred in not recognizing that that was a serious Brady issue, but he decided after he looked at the documents to put them under seal.
I think this body and I think the Justice Department could get access to those materials.
And kind of zooming out then beyond just what you endured through all of this.
You've described Arctic Frost as part of a coordinated effort, not just to simply punish individuals, but destroy the infrastructure around President Trump and a movement, really.
Maybe it's easiest actually to start with the weaponization of the bar complaint process, which some call part of lawfare, others call barfare now.
The 65 Project was created by David Brock, who is a super leftist Democrat activist.
And he specifically admitted in a scoop story he gave to Axios with Jonathan Swan, who's now at the New York Times, that his whole purpose was to make conservative lawyers, lawyers adjacent or who represented President Trump, toxic in their legal communities so that they could not get jobs and so that their reputations would be destroyed, so that no one else would represent the conservative movement.
That's a complete act of destruction aimed at our adversary system.
We can't have a system in which only one party can have election lawyers.
David Boyes and Professor Lawrence Tribe in Bush v. Gore in 2000, they faced no ethical consequences.
But somehow, if you're a Republican lawyer, if you're a John Eastman or a Rudy Giuliani, or you're a me, you are treated to an entirely different standard, and it's designed to try to shame.
Clearly, not something where the starting philosophy was let's go through a very orderly process.
I mean, the fact that the National Archives was consulting with the White House counsel's office on how to get documents to the FBI and debating whether they should go through the clear path of communicating with the president's counsel and getting consent or to concoct statutes in a way that allowed them to not do that.
The fact that you had coordination between Bragg's office and the Department of Justice, which when the House of Representatives asked that question to the Attorney General, he denied it.
But the existence of responsive records clearly indicates that there were communications.
I think this raises the significant risk that this was not a sober investigative process.
And, you know, I think this committee has done very good work on investigating that.
I think, as you pointed out, the process is the punishment.
And when you have very aggressive bureaucrats who want to coordinate with prosecutors in a way that doesn't follow the process, doesn't follow Fair procedures that raise the significant risk of conspiracy against rights.
So you were promoting efforts to tell, to raise questions about the electors in states, despite the fact that Attorney General Barr said there was no evidence to indicate fraud on any level that would come close to resulting in a reversal of the election.
The president contacted me, and under Article II, which is the ultimate procedure, Senator, the president did not contact any member of the executive branch.
Do you believe that it was a crime for people to attack officers and hit them with, hit them, pull their helmets off, to attack them with sticks and A mace and bear spray?
What are you thinking about the attacks on these officers who were standing between the mob and Nancy Pelosi or Vice President Pence and stood their ground and did their job?
And there was evidence that was presented in court, and people who committed those crimes were convicted.
Mr. Schwager, just the premise here is that it was a bogus investigation.
And all of the things that are part of a normal investigation subpoenas, making links, having a wide investigatory outreach.
Is there anything different about this investigation and what would be a thorough investigation of any other crime once there is a predicate for pursuing an investigation?
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and welcome to the three of you.
We appreciate that you all are here.
You know, Mr. Chairman, at our last Arctic Frost hearing, the Democrats on the committee brought forward a witness that said he was perfectly fine with the weaponization that took place in Arctic Frost and through Jack Smith.
In fact, he claimed that politics.
Did not exist under the Biden FBI.
His term was that politics were absent there.
And as I noted at that time, and I'll say again this morning, that was a laughable claim.
Everyone knows that Jack Smith leveraged the FBI and the DOJ to go on a years long crusade against President Trump, members of Congress, and hundreds of conservative organizations.
And individuals, and I include Mr. Epstein and Mr. Clark in this group that was targeted, as so was I and some of our colleagues.
So, Mr. Clark and Mr. Epstein, I'll start with Mr. Epstein.
I want to hear from each of you on this as you were impacted by Arctic Frost, and do you think that politics was absent?
I would start with the fact that the agent who opened his own case in violation of FBI. Protocol, Tim Tebow was actually effectively disciplined by the special counsel for violating the Hatch Act, which is an indication of the fact that he was getting into political matters.
Also, the entire name of the operation, Arctic Frost, indicates that it was political.
Mr. Epstein, I want to talk about a component of Arctic Frost, which I think has kind of gotten lost.
And that is the fact that this case ultimately came about because of an unlawfully appointed special counsel.
Specifically, we know Jack Smith was not appointed pursuant to any explicit statutory authority, as Ken Starr, John Durham, and other special counsels were appointed.
This artificial intelligence is getting more and more dangerous and more and more, I think, a concern to greater people.
The data center.
In fact, I want to play something while we got time in this block.
A young man stood up at a And this is why citizens are leading this, just like citizens, the grassroots are leading this fight in Virginia because the establishment just gets too tough a heavy lift for them.
Citizens throughout the country are standing up to these data centers in an extraordinary way.
And a lot of times, like you saw in Fort Meade, Florida, the corporate interests just steamroll.
You have 500 people show up, everybody's yelling into the microphone you can't do this, you're going to destroy our community, destroy everything.
And oh, and then the commissioners vote 6 0.
Because they're in the pocket of these companies that have trillions of dollars to spend on this.
It's pretty obvious.
Let me play this.
I want your observations.
This, I think, I believe, comes from Ohio, and it's a town commissioner's meeting.
And this is an American citizen, just an everyday person that stands up and gives them the old what for.
Let's hear it.
unidentified
Yes.
So, Mr. Hollingsworth, I know that you had your hand up to talk.
I work at Reed Memorial Library, and thank you all for hearing me today.
I'm not a cynic when it comes to technology.
My love for it started when my uncle first sat me down at a beige Windows 95 computer and began teaching me HTML.
I will never forget the first thing I Googled.
It was an image search for pigs flying.
I wanted to see if the internet could make the impossible real.
This love of the digital shaped my career as I went on to become a programmer and a professional content creator.
For the last decade and a half, I have been in service of learning burgeoning technology.
In my last job, I was the digital artist they trusted to do that kind of work.
I was the one feeding Mid Journey prompts to create the perfect commercial, training the very machine that would eventually replace me, as three months later, they would lay me off.
I didn't just watch it happen.
I was holding the tools when the tools were turned on me.
I want to stress I don't stand here as an enemy of progress.
The thing is, when I look at the data center proposal, I don't see progress.
I see a gamble where the big tech companies get the gold while Portage County foots the bill.
Now, I know there are good faith arguments for this project.
There are people in our community, informed, honest people, who will tell you that the modern data centers use what's called a closed loop system.
They say the water is filled once and recycled forever.
In a laboratory, that might be true, but we aren't living in a laboratory.
We're living in Ohio.
I can tell you that as the chips get smaller and AI demands get larger, the heat these machines generate is outstripping the closed loop theory.
To keep the servers from melting, a data center has to bleed the lines to remove toxic sludge, aka forever chemicals, and bleeding water needs to be evaporated.
It does not stay in the loop.
It evaporates into the sky by millions of gallons.
The very place that laid me off was an organic mattress company.
And while working for them, I actually learned a lot about forever chemicals.
I got to see how the sausage gets made.
I saw the inside of those so-called regulations.
I saw how rigorous studies are often self-funded, a pay-to-play model where if you've got the cash, they'll give you the certificate.
If a trillion-dollar company is funding the study that says their forever chemical won't hit our water table, they aren't giving us the science, they're giving us a sales pitch.
We're told that we have to accept this because we need big employers.
We're told that if we don't say yes, we're driving away the future.
But that's a false choice.
A big employer who uses the water of 50,000 people, which by the way is a combination of both Kent and Ravenna, only hires about 10 people is not an employer.
They are an extraction.
We are being asked to fund a 21st century luxury with a 19th century resource heist.
We are being asked to sacrifice the lifeblood of our city so a trillion dollar company can save a fraction of a cent on its margins.
We are being asked to drain our reservoirs so a chatbot can write a poem or so our sheriff can generate a picture of himself standing next to Bigfoot.
Which, by the way, of course, he made himself look taller.
They want us to trust a trillion dollar industry that tells us with a straight face that they can suck five million gallons of water out of our ground a day.
Use it as a liquid heat sink and return it to our rivers without a single consequence.
They are asking for a measured approach while they hide their actual usage behind secret contracts and NDAs.
Ohioans have seen this trick played before.
We know what happens when massive utility interests and black box energy deals get fast tracked behind closed doors.
We're still paying the bill, literally, for the first energy scandal.
We were told these bailouts were essential and measured too, and it turned out to be the largest racketeering plot in the history of our state.
So when a trillion dollar company asks for our water, our electricity, and our silence, We shouldn't just be asking for the facts.
We should be asking who is really getting the kickback and why is it our reservoir that's on the line.
There is a reason the Ohio House just voted 88 to 0 to pause and study this industry.
You know, there are a lot of Will Hollingsworths out there right now fighting on the ground, trying to make sure people call it NIMBYism, but you know what?
People should understand Joe is in huge demand as we fight this crusade against.
And I'm not a Luddite.
I come across a Luddite often.
I'm just incredibly concerned that we have a technology that I can see the convergence of wealth and power.
And it is blinding people to what legitimate concerns are.
We're like during the atomic weapons phase when there was no Atomic Energy Commission.
At all, even to give some rudimentary regulatory apparatus.
But there's even a deep issue with artificial intelligence that rolls in or is inextricably linked to another issue, and this is the information state or the surveillance state.
And a company that you cannot trust, Palantir, is now virtually a partner in our government.
Well, Steve, I think a lot of people are confused by Alex Karp, mainly because of his facility with language and his propensity to flip back and forth from more left wing rhetoric to more right wing rhetoric whenever it's convenient.
So, I mean, here's a guy who supported and donated to Biden and Harris and is now seeing, as Palantir has since its inception just after 9 11, I think 2003 they were founded, seeing a surge in adoption in the U.S. government, the military specifically.
Right now, Palantir is being deployed across all departments of the Department of War, all agencies in the Department of War.
And so what you have is this impression, as you just noted, with the manifesto, this impression of patriotism, this impression that what Alex Karp is about and what Palantir is about is going against the politically correct left.
Well, I think it falls into what Balaji Srinivasan would call like the gray tribe.
Working the red tribe as opposed to the blue tribe.
I was actually informed that maybe it was Scott Alexander who came up with that.
So sorry, Scott, if I'm stealing your thunder there.
But the idea is what matters.
These are guys who are obsessed with their toys.
They're obsessed with technology, the gray tribe, kind of alien mind, right?
And so they're willing to manipulate the politics of the Republicans, of the Democrats, of independents, whatever is convenient and whatever is lucrative, they're going to turn to.
And so, this manifesto, which is basically a distillation of Karp's book, The Technological Republic, which I am not trying to boost his sales by holding it up here, but I do think it's at least worth reading because it gives you two things.
One, it gives you an idea of the kinds of ideological moves these guys are going for in order to kind of court people on the right.
Again, patriotism, anti PC, pro prosperity, pro national defense.
But ultimately, the book itself is then, and the manifesto is.
Is thin.
I think that the two things that really stood out to me one, a statement on AI weaponry that our enemies are not going to slow down, they're not going to deliberate on whether or not to go full on with autonomous weapons.
America has to be at the forefront.
And the other is the comparison of artificial intelligence to the atomic age.
Well, as you just noted, as atomic weapons, as nuclear weapons became a threat.
To humanity across the board, the way in which it was controlled is government, and the government is much more accountable to people than a corporation.
Right now, CARP is pushing into this idea, this model that corporations can and should be responsible for things like life or death situations, but that responsibility is being more and more put off to AI.
If you look at the way in which Palantir works with Maven Smart Systems in conjunction with other systems like Anthropics Claude or OpenAI's.
GPT, what you see is that decision compression.
The notion is we can now accomplish so much more in a much shorter period of time.
But what that means is that through the surveillance systems of Palantir and through the rapid analysis done by these large language models, what used to take human beings time to deliberate on and to actually consider perhaps the ethical implications of strikes that would kill other people.
And it's interesting because if there's one thing in there that I agree with, That Carp talks about, well, two things.
One, the anti PC push, but also he talks about how.
There is a kind of degradation in the conversation around violence, around killing one's enemies abroad, that it should not be celebrated, but maybe sort of like you would read in the Bhagavad Gita, or say the Tao Te Ching, that to kill an enemy, you fight as brothers, as the Bhagavad Gita would say, or the Tao Te Ching, that you should kill an enemy as if you were going to his funeral, just with solemnity.
Well, how solemn is it if you have a situation in which some of, right now, some of the decisions being made, To kill other people are being made by machines and pushed by companies like Palantir, like Andrill, that want to see these systems deployed fully autonomously.
And you simply have machines running around making the decisions, whether it's drones or whether it's missile systems, making decisions without human oversight or just a human in the loop to say yes or no without any real knowledge of the situation.
So, yeah, Palantir, these manifestos sound great to American patriots.
When you say patriots, how can you do that when it's a company that's set up for full 24 7 surveillance?
How can you be a patriot?
I can be a patriot.
That's the way they salve themselves.
They put the salve on their soul, right?
To justify every morning when they got to look in the mirror and understand.
They understand in their heart of hearts what they're doing, but they give you a little rhetoric that, you know, I'm an American patriot and I'm doing this because we don't do what the Chinese Communist Party is.
And my point is, That same crowd, that same tech crowd behind the scenes pushes nonstop for the business opportunity to fund, finance, and equip the Chinese Communist Party.
Because the argument would be on these fully automated systems.
Well, if you add the human, you're adding an element that's going to take longer.
The Chinese Communist Party is going to have the automated.
Well, they don't have to have the automated.
We're still providing them with all that, including the financing, including the ecosystem that does that.
That's an argument.
First off, when you show me that you're committed to shutting All that down, all of it, and send all 350,000 students home and get them out of the company.
I mean, they just, yeah, today they got a guy at JFK that was photographing, I think, one of the military bases, right?
These people are nonstop, and the big tech is 100% supportive.
So that's their argument is going to be, oh, Joe Allen and Bannon don't understand.
They're Luddites, and they're going to slow down the system so the CCP can kill our warriors on the battlefield.
They have a whole political, this whole thing with the Rockbridge Capitol and all that.
It's all, this is a surveillance state.
You got to be blunt about this.
By the way, breaking news, they're saying JD's at a meeting now in the West Wing.
They're not en route, as we reported a while ago, which I think is smart because you can't get jerked around by these Iranians.
So something's, you know, President Trump.
Something's going to, I'm sure they're meeting about this very topic right now, but it looks like there's not going to be any negotiation in Islamabad.
They're building a surveillance state and they're putting this, they put, oh, we're going to give you a manifesto.
And the manifesto is going to talk about we need everybody to have universal military service.
We have to have, well, look, bro, this is not Israel.
We understand CARP is super pro Israel.
This is not Israel.
You know, as a veteran that came out of the volunteer service, we don't want everybody, right?
You don't need us, highly inefficient.
We now have self selection of people to volunteer for the military.
And I think anybody that's a professional, In the military, they would not want universal service, but they try to put a false front, a false front of patriotism and nationalism when they're anything but.
These guys are the ultimate deep staters.
They provide the surveillance apparatus to take the deep state to a much darker place than it already is.
Well, you know, again, this idea of surveillance makes sense when you're talking about surveilling your enemies, but these systems aren't just used for that.
Karp, I think the one way to look at this book, The Technological Republic, is this.
You know, when Jeff Clark was just talking about the machinery of government being turned against the president, you have to understand that machinery is built by someone, and it's built with an ideology in mind.
And Alex Karp is building this machinery with an ideology in mind.
Right now, he's courting the right.
Right now, he's a Trump guy.
He went from a Biden guy to a Trump guy, an Obama guy to a Trump guy.
These guys, they're the gray tribe.
They are an alien tribe.
Race here on earth that are manipulating red, blue, purple, whoever.
Well, I think that a lot of this is the Ragan Reykjavik play by both sides at the end of the deal.
Sources I've been talking to here and throughout the Middle East I mean, look, Greece is not the Middle East, it's Europe, but I've been talking to people throughout the Middle East.
By the way, it's 7 p.m. here, or about to be 7 p.m.
It's 9 p.m. in Islamabad.
JD can't get there before the ceasefire expires, right?
I don't know what's going to happen next, but I do think that they're a lot closer to a deal that fits the president's framework than people are saying.
I've been talking to folks who are pretty connected throughout the Middle East.
First of all, let me be clear the White House and the vice president's office, the president, et cetera, with the exception of the formal messages from the president, have been very.
You know, tight lipped, very not leaking, not talking a lot about where things are at with the negotiations.
So I'm having to talk to other people beyond the formal sides of the negotiations.
And I don't think you can really trust the Iranians, of course.
So, but the fact is, is that folks that I'm talking to throughout the Middle East are saying that they think they're actually closer to a deal and that said deal, if and when it emerges, is going to include a massive.
Investment of US energy companies into Iran.
So, like, similar to what you've seen, where the Chevrons and Exxons of the world and whatnot are going to go in and get the natural gas and the oil.
I mean, that's the Trump trademark move, right?
Like, he did it in Venezuela.
He wanted to do it in Iraq, right?
Like, it's the title of the chapter of his book, second chapter of his book, Time to Get Tough Take the Oil, right?
Like, so that's Trump's trademark move.
So, if that happens, that, you know, combined with Iran actually agreeing to not get to a nuclear weapon, Which would be a major significant development.
And then, you know, we'll hash out what happens with the nuclear materials that are there.
That's a massive win for President Trump, right?
Like, so we'll see.
Like, I just don't know where and when exactly that's going to happen.
But a lot of people think that a lot of this between both sides, both the United States and the Iranians, all saying, oh, we're not going to go, we're not going to go.
It's all theater at the end, so they can all make it look like to their various sides that they were tough.