Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told Newsmax that the recently uncovered Biden administration scheme to spy on Republican senators was fueled by “audacity.”
Lankford told "American Agenda" on Friday that, “Yeah, there was a belief that Biden was doing something,” he said, but the reality was shocking.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, broke news of the scandal in early October in a social media post as he described how the spying on phone records of senators then turned into the Biden administration’s faulty investigation into President Donald Trump and called it ”worse than Watergate.”
Lankford said, “It's different when it comes out in black and white and you actually see the names and you actually see the audacity that they had for the president of the United States and his [former President Joe Biden’s] Department of Justice to go fishing by trolling on different members of Congress and tracking their personal cell phone.”
Current Department of Justice investigators, he said, are reviewing what has been uncovered to see how far the spy scheme went beyond the individual senators who were targeted.
“We don't know all the rest of what they were [doing], OK, if you talk to this person, were they then tracking that person and then tracking the next?
"So there's still a long way to go in this investigation to be able to find out what they were actually trying to do.”
The senator said it shows “true arrogance” that intelligence operatives in the Biden administration thought they could target members of Congress with illegal spying and get away with it.
“They felt like they were going to be in power forever and that no one will ever know what we were doing. It reminds me of the biblical statement, 'What's whispered in the secret place will be shouted from the housetops,'" he said.
But, “The thing that they thought they were going to keep in the dark forever is now fully in the sunlight, and how bad this really was," he said.
Lankford added that many involved are likely to face eventual civil and even criminal actions.
Unfortunately, he said, those perpetrating the spying will also be celebrated by “those on the hard left.”
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Jim Mishler ✉
Jim Mishler, a seasoned reporter, anchor and news director, has decades of experience covering crime, politics and environmental issues.
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