Arctic Frost may not be the biggest scandal in American history – not when the government was used to frame a presidential candidate as a Kremlin ally, or when a White House cabal blatantly hid a president’s dementia from the public with the media’s help.

But the recent revelation of the Biden administration’s astonishing 2022 spying on some 430 conservatives under Arctic Frost makes it hands-down the most frightening scandal in U.S. history – for the shocking scope and brazenness of the dubious domestic spying operation.

In case you’ve missed it – and you likely have, if you get your news from legacy media – over a year after the Jan. 6 Capitol protest, and in advance of an obvious Trump reelection campaign, Biden special counsel Jack Smith used Arctic Frost, and the fearsome levers of federal might, as a pretext to spy on the political opposition.

According to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Smith issued 197 subpoenas to 34 individuals and 163 businesses covering “at least 430 named Republican individuals and entities.”

In a sweeping fishing expedition aimed at catching any Trump supporter it could in a misdeed – or just to find out what they know – the Biden administration cast a vast net to haul in citizens’ bank records and all communications between his unsuspecting targets and media outlets, the Trump White House and Congress.

Specifically, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Smith was fishing for:

• Communications with media companies such as CBS, Fox News, Fox Business, Newsmax, Sinclair and others.
• Communications with “any member, employee or agent of the Legislative Branch of the U.S. Government.”
• Communications with White House advisors, such as Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino, Jared Kushner, Lara Trump and others.
• Statistical data and analysis relating to donors and fundraising efforts.
• Broad financial data relating to conservative individuals and entities.

Stasi much? What alleged crime was the predicate for spying on so many fellow Americans, pray tell? What kind of government is used to spy so flagrantly and unashamedly on its own citizens, and with such sinister groundlessness?

Not a free country’s government, that’s for sure.

Arctic Frost’s deep-sea trawling in the lives of hundreds of innocent Americans is exceeded in scope, but not nefariousness, only by Barack Obama’s massive National Security Agency spying scandal, the one exposed by government whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Still, the tundra-sized Arctic Frost scandal far eclipses dreaded Watergate – which generously gave all future scandals its “-gate” suffix – for sheer size, audacity and constitutional effrontery and disdain.

Consider the differences between Watergate and Arctic Frost:

Watergate was a reelection campaign’s slipshod attempt to spy on a hapless opposition – an operation involving five Keystone Burglars who couldn’t shoot a flashlight straight.

Watergate was not an official government scheme, and didn’t target hundreds of civilians’ communications and even bank records. Arctic Frost, in contrast, was a spying operation by a fully armed and operational government against some 400 perceived political enemies, mostly in the private sector and merely because of their political views.

Nor did Watergate manage to spy on eight Republican U.S. senators and one GOP congressman, as Arctic Frost infamously did in its historic rubicon-crossing.

Set against the magnitude and the gall of Arctic Frost, Watergate now appears, as the Nixon administration so cynically put it, to be a “third-rate burglary.”

The media’s role in the two scandals also couldn’t be more divergent.

Watergate was media-driven, by Washington Post reporters who became legends of journalism. In sharp contrast, it took the second Trump administration to unveil the Arctic Frost scandal. And since then, the legacy media have appeared intent on burying the scandal rather than shining a light on it.

“Not one single broadcast network aired one solitary second” of Arctic Frost coverage in the days immediately following its Oct. 30 reveal, Media Research Center President David Bozell notes.

“Normally they’ll mention it in the most innocuous way so they can later say, ‘We covered it,’ but this time they didn’t even bother.”

The country actually got more coverage, and more overheated coverage, of the innocuous addition of a White House ballroom. Just stew in that for a moment while honest historians wait to pounce.

In contrast, liberals covered themselves with what they thought was glory, and gave themselves “prestigious” awards, for their breathless coverage of a Trump Russia collusion that not only never occurred, but which was the concoction of the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and, subsequently, the Obama administration.

Neither could the politics of Watergate and Arctic Frost be more dissimilar: Back in the 1970s, Republicans joined with Democrats in helping chase a GOP president from office for the Watergate coverup. Today, nary a Democrat would deign to even acknowledge the much bigger Arctic Frost scandal, much less help bring the perpetrators to justice.

Let’s hope the two scandals at least have that kind of accountability in common.

(Illustration courtesy of SuperGrok.)