Republican Senators Hagerty, Hawley, Sullivan, Tuberville, Johnson, Lummis, and Blackburn held a press conference on Monday to reveal that the Department of Justice and former special counsel Jack Smith spied on them.

SEN. RON JOHNSON (R-WI): First of all, I want to thank Senator Grassley. It is because of his relentless advocacy for whistleblowers that a lot of this information is surfacing right now. We wouldn’t know about the list of a hundred Republican entities that were targeted by Jack Smith’s Arctic Frost investigation. I don’t think we’d know about this as well. So we need whistleblowers. I think Dan Bongino and other folks in the FBI, they don’t know where all the records are hidden. They still don’t. They’re not necessarily getting 100% cooperation, but this is outrageous what has happened. I just want to give you a timeline of this. I think you’ve already got the FBI sheet that shows the number of members of Congress that were targeted. Representative Kelly, Senators Graham, Hagerty, Hawley, Sullivan, Tuberville, myself, Senator Lummis, and Blackburn. This memo was dated September of 2023. To put it all into context, the Mar-a-Lago raid occurred in August of 2022. Jack Smith announced the indictments against President Trump in August of 2023. So this is almost two months later. They’re casting this net, this fishing expedition against members of the Senate and the House. I’ve been investigating this with Senator Grassley. This doesn’t surprise me, but it should shock every American of what the Biden administration has done. By the way, this is the first time I was targeted by the FBI. Under the Obama administration, the same thing happened to both Senator Grassley and I. As part of the foreign influence task force, we were giving a briefing to try and convince us that the Hunter Biden laptop was no big deal, basically trying to throw us off the track. So this is major corruption that’s being revealed inside the Obama and Biden Department of Justice, the FBI. And I’ll turn it over to, I guess, Senator Hagerty, who’s, you know, one of the individuals, again, none of us were subject to targets of this investigation. There’s no predicate. There’s no reason for this other than a fishing expedition, which again should outrage and shock every American. Senator Hagerty. SEN. BILL HAGERTY (R-TN): Thank you, Senator Johnson and Chairman Grassley. Thank you for your leadership in making this happen. This is an extraordinary revelation that just took place this afternoon. My colleagues and I found out, all of us Republicans, by the way, that we were placed under investigation by this FBI under the Joe Biden FBI that was led, I presume, by Jack Smith and his predecessors. This isn’t the first time that it’s happened, though. Senator Johnson just mentioned this. I served on the Trump transition team in Trump Tower in 2016. Senator Blackburn was vice chair of the Transition Committee then, as were probably a dozen or more members of Congress. To think that we were all surveilled back then by the Obama FBI. This corruption runs deep, and it’s gone on for far too long. And the fact that it’s happened here again, the fact that they are looking at our records in 2023, sitting members of the United States Senate. Again, the only thing that we have in common, the only thing in common in this entire list, is that we’re all Republicans. They’ve decided to come after us. This is as partisan as it gets. The FBI and the corruption that’s running there has to be cleared out. Thank God we have Kash Patel and Dan Bongino there. This has to be addressed. It has to be resolved. It needs to happen today. Thank you.

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