The Judge in the Room
Now here's the question almost no one is asking. During Arctic Frost — the Biden-era FBI operation that used 197 subpoenas to target over 400 Republican individuals and organizations — Jack Smith's team was holding private communications with two Obama-appointed DC District Court judges overseeing the grand jury: Chief Judge Beryl Howell and her successor Judge James Boasberg. A DOJ briefing document released by Grassley shows Howell privately told prosecutors she "liked" and "loved" their legal strategy against Trump — ex parte, without Trump's lawyers present. Howell was the same judge who supervised Mueller's grand jury. Boasberg was the same judge who later chastised the FBI for misleading the FISA court in the Carter Page case — and then kept overseeing Trump-related proceedings anyway. The question that demands an answer: how deep did the coordination between prosecutors and judges in the DC District Court actually go? Thread.
Four Operations. Nine Years. One Target.
Here is the full picture now coming into focus through Grassley and Gabbard's disclosures. The FBI ran four consecutive code-named counterintelligence operations against Donald Trump and his associates spanning nearly a decade — from summer 2016 to the day he was inaugurated in January 2025. Their names: Crossfire Hurricane (2016 — Russia collusion, predicated on the fabricated Steele Dossier). Round River (opened in Pittsburgh, targeting Rudy Giuliani and others who investigated Biden family corruption in Ukraine). Plasmic Echo (the Mar-a-Lago classified documents raid, run in coordination with Biden's DOJ). Arctic Frost (Jack Smith's operation targeting 400+ Republicans, including sitting US Senators, with gag-ordered subpoenas buried in prohibited-access files). Not one of these operations produced a successful criminal conviction of Trump. Every one of them was predicated on evidence that is now being shown to be false, fabricated, or improperly withheld. All four files were deliberately hidden — marked "prohibited access" — so that even most FBI agents couldn't see them.
🧵 And Carter Page wasn't the only Trump adviser illegally wiretapped under Crossfire Hurricane. A second victim just came forward — and the same cast of characters is responsible. This one is getting almost zero mainstream coverage.
Who Is Walid Phares
Walid Phares is a Lebanese Christian scholar, one of America's foremost experts on Middle East terrorism and Islamist movements, and a senior foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. He is exactly the kind of person Trump needed around him — and exactly the kind of person the network running these operations needed to neutralize.
The Wiretap
According to newly declassified FBI documents released by Senator Grassley and reported exclusively by Paul Sperry at RealClearInvestigations, Phares was placed under FISA surveillance for a full 12 months between 2017 and 2018 — as part of Mueller's Crossfire Hurricane spinoff. The FBI obtained three FISA orders against him: an original warrant and two renewals. He was never charged with anything. "I had no idea any of this was happening," Phares told RCI. "This is shocking because they told my lawyer I was only a 'witness.'"
The Same Playbook
Just as with Carter Page, the FBI withheld exculpatory evidence from the FISA court to keep the surveillance going. The FBI agent assigned to investigate Phares testified that everything collected "aided the investigation only to prove the target was being honest." The original allegations — a large foreign money payment, a clandestine overseas meeting — were never confirmed. Nothing. But the warrants kept coming.
Kevin Clinesmith Again
The agent tried to correct the record. He flagged the problems in the FISA application multiple times and pushed for the court to be informed. He was blocked by FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith — the same man who pled guilty to fabricating evidence in the Carter Page case by altering a CIA memo to make Page appear to be a Russian agent rather than a US intelligence asset. When the agent sent corrections to Clinesmith, the response was: "We can't send this to DOJ." The court was never told. The warrant was renewed anyway.
Phares Speaks
Phares told RealClearInvestigations directly: "They knew they had nothing on Russia, so they went after me on Egypt. But the main target was President Trump. They had to neutralize him and any of his associates who could carry out his agenda." He also believes Brennan's CIA was separately monitoring him beyond the FBI's FISA operation. He intends to sue the FBI and the Justice Department. Every formal review of Crossfire Hurricane failed to surface or disclose what was done to Phares. It was buried.
Close
Carter Page. Walid Phares. Four sequential code-named operations. Ex parte communications between prosecutors and judges. Intercepts of foreign officials plotting to loop US aid into a presidential campaign — buried by the administration that benefited. The Atkinson transcript locked in a SCIF for six years. The Russia ICA built on a dossier its own authors knew was fabricated. This is not a series of mistakes or institutional failures. This is a sustained, deliberate political operation run through the machinery of American intelligence and law enforcement against one man and everyone around him — for nine consecutive years. Grassley and Gabbard are pulling the thread faster now. The disclosures are coming. The question that remains — the only question that matters — is how many of these people will end up in handcuffs and how many will be permanently shunned by an American public awakened to the fact that we survived a 10 year reign of terror by a government which became overtly fascist.
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