The most annoying media “fact-check” is the one that pretends certain words don’t mean what we all know them to mean. We’re talking about the defensive responses this week to the revelation that the Biden Justice Department spied on eight Republican senators.
It’s not spying, respond the critics. Just think of it as unannounced monitoring! Secret scrutiny! Quiet stalking! Remember, it’s only spying if it comes from a disfavored region of the Potomac. Otherwise, it’s just “sparkling surveillance.”
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Then-special counsel Jack Smith in 2023 directed FBI agents to collect the phone data of eight GOP lawmakers: Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Dan Sullivan (R-AK), according to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA).
Federal investigators then employed specific FBI procedures to conceal the operation, the Iowa senator added.
The “tolling data” collection, which focused on calls made in early January 2021 and was conducted without the consent or knowledge of the senators, reviewed the numbers called, the locations of the callers when the calls were made, the times and dates of the calls, and the calls’ duration. Notably, the sweep did not include a review of the content of the calls. Equally notable is that five of the eight Republican senators had cosigned a letter in early January 2021 calling for a delay in certifying the 2020 presidential election results.
The data collection was then quietly covered up by use of the FBI’s “Prohibited Access” protocols, which allow agents to hide certain records from fellow agents, according to Grassley, who added the operation only came to light thanks to federal law enforcement whistleblowers.
Whether what Smith and the FBI did was legal is one conversation. Whether we can call it “spying” is another. Was it spying? That is, was it “the secret gathering of information on others”? It certainly seems fair to say it was, without torturing the commonly accepted meaning of the word or misleading audiences into thinking one thing when it’s another.
Then again, for certain members of the press, words tend to take on exciting and new meanings depending on the circumstances.
“No,” asserted MSNBC justice correspondent Ken Dilanian, who was disowned by the Los Angeles Times in 2014 after it was revealed he regularly submitted his story copy to CIA officers for review, “senators weren’t wiretapped or spied on.”
He added, “Their calling records were obtained lawfully by FBI agents trying to figure out who Donald Trump was talking to amid his allegedly criminal scheme to overturn the election.”
They weren’t spied on, you see. The FBI only lawfully collected their phone records without their knowledge or consent! Big difference!
Meanwhile, CNN merely insists that “the evidence” does not “fit what is traditionally understood to constitute ‘spying.’”
Well, all right then.
In like-minded quarters of media, the refrain wasn’t so much “this isn’t spying” as it was a combination of “what happened was normal” and “what happened was completely justified.”
“It actually seems sort of obvious that if you’re investigating a former president of the United States for trying to subvert an election,” said Politico’s Kyle Cheney, “you’d probe some of contacts he and alleged co-conspirators had with people he was trying to enlist/pressure to overturn the results.”
Others still argued that Grassley’s announcement was a big nothing and that Republicans were simply putting on a show for their colleagues and constituents.
“It’s probably political posturing,” MSNBC legal analyst Catherine Christian said, making it sound as if unannounced “trolling data” sweeps U.S. senators are an everyday occurrence. “It makes sense that the special counsel would want to know who these particular senators called and who called them during Jan. 4 to Jan. 7, 2021.”
“It’s actually — it’s very normal to, as an investigation that this was, to subpoena, it’s usually a subpoena, to get phone records of who called who as part of the investigation, particularly for a timeline,” she added. “So it was very — it’s not out of the ordinary, and particularly during that time period. If [it] was going on for months and months and months, then you could be concerned. But since it was limited to that period of the indictment, it makes sense.”
In a refutation to these claims, one that may suggest there is actually a there there — not a single network carried news of Grassley’s allegations the day they were announced. The networks did, however, manage to cover Taylor Swift’s new music video and LeBron James’s upcoming “Big Decision.” Bias is generally seen in what’s not said, and declining to cover the Grassley announcement may say more than any network script could ever say.
All of this, of course, is in direct service of downplaying the fact that a Democratic administration spied on Republican senators. This is a true thing that happened. Yet, we have members of the press denying that the word “spy” means what it is commonly understood to mean. We also have members of the press attempting to normalize what happened. Tellingly, we have little by way of anyone in media willing to say the true sentence, “A Democratic administration spied on Republican senators.”
It’s every bit as frustrating as when journalists and pundits sigh and roll their eyes whenever President Donald Trump and his circle claim the Obama administration spied on the 2016 GOP presidential campaign.
The Obama administration didn’t spy, journalists insist. The Obama Justice Department merely baited Trump campaign officials with an FBI informant. It only surveilled another campaign official using dubiously obtained FISA warrants. It simply stovepiped an obviously bogus, Clinton-campaign-financed dossier into the mainstream.
Or, my personal favorite from the New York Times, “FBI used informant to investigate Russia ties to campaign, not to spy.”
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It’s not spying. It’s using an informant!
Whether the Obama administration or Smith was justified in their actions is one conversation. Just don’t treat your audience like it’s too stupid to know what is meant by the word “spy.”
Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.