MaddowBlog-The latest Republican conspiracy theory about the FBI and Jan. 6 starts to unravel

[LetMyPeopleVote]

Republicans are claiming that the FBI was caught “spying” on congressional Republicans and “tapping” their phones. That’s really not what happened.

Republicans have spent the last few days claiming, with varying degrees of hysteria, that the Biden-era FBI was caught “spying” on GOP members and “tapping” their phones.

In reality, that's really not what happened. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-10-08T17:00:06.472Z

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/january-6-fbi-republican-conspiracy-theory-rcna236367

On Monday, a group of congressional Republicans claimed that the FBI analyzed the personal cellphone data of nine GOP lawmakers as part of the probe into the Jan. 6 attack. NBC News reported:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, shared a one-page, unclassified document that he said shows that the cellphone ‘tolling data’ of Republican lawmakers was sought and obtained in 2023 as part of the FBI’s ‘Arctic Frost’ investigation — a precursor of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into efforts by President Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election results.

.....The New York Times reported, “The analysis of phone toll records is a common investigative tactic. ... Such toll record information does not include the contents of conversations, which would require a court-approved wiretap.”

A related analysis from CNN explained that there’s nothing especially surprising about any of this.

We already knew that the phone records of some lawmakers were seized in Smith’s probe, because the Justice Department had to overcome legal hurdles posed by the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. And it’s difficult to understand how Smith ever could have conducted such a probe without obtaining some phone records of lawmakers. That’s because Trump’s pressure on lawmakers was a key part of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. ... It would seem very difficult to piece together a case without understanding who was talking to whom, and when.

MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian emphasized a related point, noting that the former special counsel’s final report, released earlier this year, made note of these same toll records.

Plenty of other independent observers drew a similar conclusion. “It actually seems sort of obvious that if you’re investigating a former president of the United States for trying to subvert an election, you’d probe some of contacts he and alleged co-conspirators had with people he was trying to enlist/pressure to overturn the results,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted.