Tennessee’s two U.S. senators, both of whom are either running for another office or said to be interested in a new role, found their 2021 communication had been targeted, an FBI document revealed Monday.
Both Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who is running in the 2026 Republican gubernatorial primary, and Bill Hagerty, who has declared for a second term in the Senate but is said to have discussed becoming chief executive officer of the Tennessee Valley Authority, were two of nearly a dozen lawmakers who learned federal officials had looked into their cellular data without their awareness during the probe of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, the day when the results of the 2020 presidential election were certified.
The scrutiny of the Congress members’ call logs and metadata allegedly came under the director of former Biden White House Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose “Arctic Frost” investigation targeted the events on and around the Jan. 6 riot. The information, not sought until nearly two years after the election certification, included the numbers the senators called, where the phone call originated and the location where it was received.
No information has been revealed why the special counsel needed the information or how, if at all, it informed his later conclusions about Trump.
“The FBI under Joe Biden and under Barack Obama exercised activity that they had no authority to exercise,” Blackburn told media Monday. “… [W]e know what they did in 2016 to the Trump transition team. And now we find out that after the Mar-a-Lago raid [in August 2022], after the indictment of President Trump [in August 2023], they surveil us, people who support President Trump — members who are all Republicans. But it shows you how out of control and rotten to the core and politicized the FBI had become, and how they had absolutely no problem whatsoever with political weaponization. We appreciate the information we have gotten to date. We look forward to further investigation on this.”