In 1972, a small team of operatives connected to President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign broke into the Democratic National Committee’s offices in the Watergate complex to install listening devices. To this day, there is no conclusive evidence that Nixon personally ordered — or even knew of — the break-in beforehand. Yet Watergate shaped American political consciousness for decades. It gave the world a permanent suffix for scandal and became the ultimate symbol of abuse of power, a crisis so severe that it culminated in the only resignation of a U.S. president to preempt removal from office.
Fast forward 50 years, and what has come to light under the Biden administration dwarfs the clumsy efforts of Nixon’s campaign operatives. According to a newly released document from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the FBI secretly monitored the phone records of at least eight sitting Republican senators. While the bureau is said not to have accessed the content of the conversations, it could see who was called, when the calls were made, how long they lasted, and even the location data.
The ostensible justification was special counsel Jack Smith’s phony investigation into whether President Donald Trump sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election — a claim that has no connection to these senators and provides no legal basis for examining their communications, especially since their phone records were sought three years after the election and two months after Trump had already been indicted for allegedly trying to overturn it. The entire operation was a flagrantly abusive fishing expedition carried out with total impunity. The internal FBI document confirming the bureau’s actions was then buried in a secret “prohibited access” file, where it was recently unearthed by FBI Director Kash Patel.
Method and Intent
What distinguishes this moment from Watergate is not merely scale, but method and intent. Whereas Nixon’s break-in involved a handful of operatives in a single office, this operation represents the weaponization of the federal government’s security apparatus against a political movement. As a highly sensitive investigative matter, or SIM in FBI parlance, it is extremely unlikely that surveillance of senators’ communications occurred without the knowledge of senior leadership, including Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray. The official FBI document released by Grassley is a formal, internal agency record confirming the bureau’s monitoring of the phone records, confirming that this was not a rogue operation but a sanctioned and coordinated activity. It was a deliberate abuse of power, a breach of constitutional boundaries, and a massive intrusion into the separation of powers.
The officials involved are not newcomers. Beyond Smith, Garland, and Wray, the latest document released by Grassley on Monday once again implicates FBI agent Timothy Thibault, a well-known figure in anti-Trump operations. Thibault has been involved in nearly every fabricated investigation since 2016, including Russiagate, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop probe under the false claim it was a Russian plot, and the orchestration of the 2020 election “investigation” long before Jack Smith arrived. Many other names, including those of special supervisory agents who executed the operation, remain redacted — another all-too-common problem, whereby officials who sabotage investigations and persecute political opponents are shielded by the system. It remains unclear exactly who in the Biden White House organized the effort, though well-documented contacts between White House officials and Smith’s team strongly suggest high-level coordination.
Staggering Scale
The scale of political targeting is staggering. Earlier whistleblower disclosures showed that the same FBI operation did not stop with senators. At least 92 Republican groups and individuals, including Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, were targeted. The 2020 election “investigation” was never a genuine inquiry. It was a coordinated campaign aimed at undermining the entire conservative movement.
The contrast with Watergate could not be more stark. Private operatives broke the rules, and the system responded: they were prosecuted, and the president resigned to uphold the integrity of the office and the Constitution. Today, official actors break the rules openly, wielding the federal government’s immense surveillance powers against their political adversaries, and no one faces accountability. The legacy media either ignores it or presents it as a routine investigation. Where Nixon’s burglary triggered a constitutional crisis, the FBI spying on senators elicits nothing more than polite press releases and calls for committees to “get to the bottom of it,” even from Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who was not among the eight senators targeted.
This is why the current crisis is far darker than Watergate. Instead of breaking into an office, senior officials within a Democratic administration broke into the Republic itself. Its laws, its institutions, and the public’s trust in government as a neutral arbiter have all been compromised. And yet, there will be no Watergate moment. There will be no early morning raids on the architects of this scandal. There will be no public reckoning. In a few weeks, most people will have forgotten that it ever happened, that is if they ever heard about it at all. Unless those responsible are held accountable, the government’s power will continue to be weaponized, and history will repeat itself.