More than 1,700 pages of documents released by the House and Senate Judiciary Committee this week reveal a Biden administration FBI determined to investigate not just President Trump, but the vast majority of conservative organizations and individuals involved in the 2020 election. What is revealed in those documents, in those 197 subpoenas, is nothing short of a Biden Administration enemies list.
00:02:02.640The House and Senate Judiciary Committees releasing two separate troves of documents this week,
00:02:11.800each revealing a Biden administration FBI determined to investigate not just President Trump,
00:02:18.520but the vast majority of the conservative movement.
00:02:21.280The House Judiciary Committee releasing documents provided by FBI Director Cash Patel
00:02:26.400showing dozens of Republican figures wrapped up in what was known as the Arctic Frost Investigation,
00:02:33.820which began as an examination of the alternate slates of electors Team Trump pushed in the 2020 election
00:02:39.940and developed into Special Counsel Jack Smith's wider probe into interference around the 2020 election,
00:02:47.080a dragnet that surveilled U.S. senators, financial institutions,
00:02:52.120basically GOP heavyweights having anything to do with Donald Trump.
00:02:56.400The Senate Judiciary Committee releasing whistleblower documents containing the actual subpoenas
00:03:01.540issued by Special Counsel Jack Smith, targeting at least 430 Republican individuals and entities,
00:03:09.080including media companies like Fox and Newsmax, as well as Turning Point USA,
00:03:14.360Make America Great Again PAC, eight GOP senators, and private individuals scrutinized in what
00:03:21.280Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley describes as an FBI fishing expedition
00:03:25.860to, quote, improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus.
00:03:31.000That probe zeroing in on the GOP's so-called false electors scheme,
00:03:36.340a plan in which pro-Trump electors in several battleground states submitted alternate election certificates
00:03:42.560claiming Mr. Trump had won those states in hopes that they would be counted during the January 6th vote certification.
00:03:49.600The Trump camp describing these as contingent electors to preserve President Trump's legal rights amid ongoing legal challenges to the 2020 election.
00:03:59.480On Wednesday, GOP senators arguing these latest revelations unveil a scandal as big as any in modern political history.
00:04:07.480What is revealed in those 1,700 pages of documents, in those 197 subpoenas, is nothing short of a Biden administration enemies list.
00:04:17.960People need to understand how politicized the Biden administration turned all these agencies.
00:04:23.120Arctic Frost is Joe Biden's Watergate.
00:04:26.700Merrick Garland was a fundamentally corrupt attorney general.
00:04:30.540Jack Smith was a fundamentally corrupt prosecutor.
00:04:34.440This was a political enemies list from the beginning.
00:04:38.000In this instance, I can't think of a bigger political scandal in the last hundred years.
00:04:43.660So if you want to compare it to Watergate, this is a hundred times worse than Watergate.
00:04:47.120We spoke with CEO of The Federalist, Sean Davis, about the significance of these documents.
00:04:52.600So Arctic Frost was a wide-ranging, massive investigation basically against the entire national Republican Party infrastructure launched under the Joe Biden administration, namely under the authority of special counsel Jack Smith.
00:05:09.520And it purported to be investigating January 6th and election interference and stuff like that.
00:05:16.160But that was all really a pretext to create legal reasons to destroy the Biden administration's entire political opposition in the country.
00:05:26.020They wanted to destroy their opponents.
00:05:27.940And they kind of cooked up a whole bunch of reasons, whether it's January 6th or Trump calling shenanigans on the election or what have you.
00:05:38.500They wanted to use that as a basis to effectively legally terrorize their opposition.
00:05:45.080The House Judiciary Committee documents contained the FBI information used to justify the investigation.
00:05:51.560That tranche was difficult to parse, says Davis.
00:05:54.180But the Senate drop, provided by whistleblowers, contained 197 subpoenas and hundreds of pages of underlying documentation.
00:06:03.740So it was a massive, massive release that is starting to make clear the full breadth and insanity of this fishing expedition by Jack Smith and the Biden DOJ.
00:06:15.520It wouldn't surprise me if there's more.
00:06:18.140They were subpoenaing Trump's campaign, the RNC itself, Trump-affiliated PACs, conservative organizations, legal organizations, individuals.
00:06:29.200They were trying to find and target and burrow into and learn every single possible thing about what every major figure in Republican politics was doing in the country.
00:06:39.020They wanted to know who they were talking to, what they were talking about, who they were emailing, who they were doing business with, what their bank records looked like.
00:06:48.000And this even included United States senators, who clearly had nothing to do, even if this thing is cooked up, they clearly had nothing to do with any of it.
00:06:58.000Davis says these revelations are worse than the scandal that forced President Nixon to resign from office in 1974.
00:07:05.020When we had Watergate, what we had was a scandal over a break-in by a handful of people of the Democrat Party headquarters, and they alleged that Nixon knew about it and tried to cover it up.
00:07:19.960But it was a one-time break-in of a party headquarters on one evening by a handful of people.
00:07:25.540What we had here was a multi-year fishing expedition using the most powerful tools and weapons in the entire federal government against hundreds, if not thousands of people, including the former and future president of the United States, all his aides, his campaign funders, the organizations that supported him, and the people who worked there.
00:07:46.380It is bigger than Watergate in the same way that the Pacific Ocean is bigger than your bathtub.
00:07:53.980Smith's investigation into the electorate's scheme was ultimately rendered moot by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling recognizing presidential immunity for most official acts in office.
00:08:05.400And not a moment too soon, says Davis.
00:08:08.300They were demanding financial records, basically any name they could get on from anyone with any real major influence within the national Republican and conservative party infrastructure.
00:08:20.260So they used it to go after alternate electors in places like Arizona or Georgia.
00:09:12.100You cannot have this type of behavior go unpunished.
00:09:15.020So I very much hope that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, understands that the risk that not punishing these people poses to the future of the country.
00:09:24.340Because you cannot have a country where one party is allowed to do this over and over and over again and nothing ever happens to them.
00:09:31.200Coming up, hundreds of cuts at CBS News and some big names rumored to be on the chopping block and multiple aggressive medical research monkeys on the loose in Mississippi.
00:09:45.480When customers are walking through the aisles of their local Walmart, they're not just picking up groceries or supplies.
00:09:56.060They are supporting American businesses and their communities.
00:09:59.300The real story is what's behind the label.
00:10:01.500With over two-thirds of the products Walmart buys made, grown, or assembled right here in the U.S., buying local is not just stocking shelves.
00:10:11.680Because of that commitment, Walmart invested $350 billion in U.S. manufacturing, helping American companies like Fisher and Weezer Specialty Foods, a local Texas business, expand their operations in Fredericksburg, Texas.
00:10:26.020Hire more people as well and bring their Texas-grown peach jam to a national market.
00:10:30.400Their story is just one example of how Walmart's U.S. manufacturing investment is supporting over 750,000 American jobs.
00:10:38.780Businesses across the country are empowered to sell more, hire more, and help their communities grow.
00:10:43.340From farms to factories to final shopping carts, learn how Walmart is fueling the future of U.S. manufacturing at walmart.com slash americaatwork.
00:10:53.960Paramount laying off about 2,000 workers beginning yesterday, following its merger with Skydance Media earlier this year.
00:11:05.260CEO David Ellison writing in a memo to employees, quote,
00:11:08.560In some areas, we are addressing redundancies that have emerged across the organization.
00:11:13.740In others, we are phasing out roles that are no longer aligned with our evolving priorities and the new structure designed to strengthen our focus on growth.
00:11:21.740The CBS News division seeing about 100 employees cut, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:11:27.740Part of a broader restructuring underway at CBS under Ellison, beginning with purchasing independent media outlet The Free Press and installing its founder, Barry Weiss, as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
00:11:39.360The layoffs were reportedly planned before Weiss was hired.
00:11:43.700Early steps in the overhaul, eliminating streaming shows, CBS Mornings Plus and CBS Evening News Plus, and closing the South Africa Bureau.
00:11:53.400The LA Times reporting the Race and Culture Unit, formed in the 2020 aftermath of George Floyd's death, was closed down as well.
00:12:02.480Two weeks after NBC closed its same department, it was BS window dressing all along.
00:12:09.360Some of those employees will reportedly be moved to other divisions.
00:12:14.020The New York Post reporting earlier this week, next on the chopping block, could be some of the longest-tenured 60 Minutes anchors, as Weiss aims to revive the marquee show, once known as the Lion's Den, due to its gold-standard hard-nosed journalism.
00:12:27.840Bill Whitaker, a possible target, he has been criticized for throwing softball questions, according to The Post,
00:12:33.700like in his interview with Vice President Kamala Harris just weeks before the 2024 election.
00:12:39.540I've been covering the border for years, and so I know this is not a problem that started with your administration.
00:12:48.460You have accused Donald Trump of using racist tropes.
00:12:53.080I'm glad you are pointing these comments out that he has made that have resulted in a response by most reasonable people to say it's just wrong.
00:13:05.580Earlier this year, parent company Paramount agreeing to settle with President Trump over allegations that interview was edited to unfairly help the Democratic nominee.
00:13:14.020Scott Pelley, also rumored to be on Weiss's potential list.
00:13:18.280In March 2024, Pelley humiliated himself in an interview with the Moms for Liberty co-founders, raising concerns about graphic sexual content in books commonly found in school libraries.
00:13:30.580A very real problem Pelley openly scoffed at and downplayed.
00:13:35.360Parents send their children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology.
00:13:40.300What ideology are they being indoctrinated into?
00:13:42.840Let's just say, children in America cannot read.
00:13:47.680They often dodged questions with talking points.
00:14:03.520They're looking at these books where sexual discussions are happening with their children at younger and younger ages.
00:14:09.480Tiffany Justice read from sexually explicit books written for older teens, but found in a few lower schools.
00:14:18.880Most people wouldn't want them in a lower school.
00:14:21.900But in a tactic of outrage politics, Moms for Liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes these examples are not rare mistakes, but a plot to sexualize children.
00:14:35.540Just over a year later, a case about parents' rights to opt out of insane radical school curriculum went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the parents won.
00:14:45.960The high court recognizing, contrary to what Scott Pelley told his audience, this inappropriate material is indeed appearing in grade schools in violation of parents' rights.
00:14:57.94016-year CBS veteran John Dickerson, too, announcing he will leave the network at the end of the year.
00:15:04.220In September, Dickerson facing criticism for reporting Charlie Kirk's alleged assassin's motive, quote, remains elusive.
00:15:12.380That was after plenty of evidence had emerged, revealing the shooter's leftist beliefs and deep hatred of Charlie.
00:15:20.660The Federal Reserve cutting interest rates for the second time this year, lowering the benchmark rate by a quarter point to a range between 3.75 and 4%, the lowest in three years.
00:15:34.060Fed Chair Jerome Powell saying interest rate policy is not, quote, on a pre-set course, and another reduction at the next meeting in December, quote, is not a foregone conclusion.
00:15:44.380Markets mixed yesterday, closing with the Dow down slightly, the S&P 500 flat, and the Nasdaq ticking up slightly.
00:15:52.780Powell saying President Trump's tariffs have had only a, quote, fairly modest impact on overall inflation, but Americans still feel the pain of higher prices from years past.
00:16:02.680The reason they're so unhappy about inflation is the inflation that we had in 2021, 2, and 3.
00:16:07.480Because, you know, you can say that prices aren't going up as much, but that doesn't mean people aren't feeling those higher prices from the inflation we had 2 or 3 years ago.
00:16:18.200They are, and that's, I think, a large part of why the public, if you sample people, inflation is still very much making people quite unhappy.
00:16:26.160President Trump, who has long argued for lowering interest rates, making it clear multiple times this week these cuts will not serve as a lifeline for Powell's job.
00:16:35.320The prices are way down. Mortgage rates are down, despite having an incompetent head of the Fed.
00:16:42.020I call him too late. He's always too late. He's too late in lowering interest rates. I call him Jerome Too Late Powell.
00:16:48.380When do you think you'll make a decision on the Fed, last Fed question?
00:16:51.100I'd say maybe by the end of the year. I think by the end of the year. Early next year, but by the end of the year.
00:16:56.220We want to get too late out as soon as possible. We want to be too early with too late.
00:17:01.740Powell's term as chair is set to end in May of 2026.
00:17:06.160Audience members from Mississippi may want to pay some extra attention to this next story.
00:17:13.880Authorities are searching for three monkeys still on the loose after a truck carrying research animals overturned on Interstate 59,
00:17:23.300about 85 miles southeast of Jackson, the state's capital.
00:17:27.000The crash occurring on Tuesday afternoon.
00:17:29.300Dispatch audio capturing the moment responders first learned of the emergency.
00:17:33.480We got 21 monkeys that was on this truck.