Some people find religion after a brush with mortality. Lindsey Graham found the Fourth Amendment after a brush with Jack Smith.
The senator from South Carolina has spent the past two decades helping build the modern surveillance state, and now he’s furious that it turned its cold electronic eye on him.
Federal prosecutors secretly subpoenaed his phone records without his knowledge as part of Special Counsel Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s alleged role in the events of January 6.
Graham says it’s an outrage, a scandal. He’s demanding the impeachment of the federal judge who approved it and threatening to sue someone, though he hasn’t worked out who, for “tens of millions of dollars.”
It’s the kind of melodrama that comes easily to a man who’s never been shy about using the power of the state when it suits him.
This story started last month when FBI Director Kash Patel revealed that phone records of eight Republican senators, including Graham’s, were pulled as part of Smith’s “Arctic Frost” probe.
The data covered January 4 to 7, 2021, and came with gag orders preventing telecom companies from telling the targets they were under the microscope.
“They spied on my phone records as a senator and a private citizen,” Graham complained on Fox News. “I’m sick of it.”
He’s not wrong to be angry. But there’s something deeply comic about Graham discovering his inner civil libertarian only after the dragnet landed on his number.
Graham has been one of the most reliable defenders of the surveillance architecture that is now bothering him.
In 2001, as a House member, he voted for the Patriot Act, the law that kicked open the door for mass data collection. When Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was collecting Americans’ phone records by the millions, Graham didn’t seem alarmed.
“I’m a Verizon customer. It doesn’t bother me one bit for the NSA to have my phone number,” he famously said. “I’m glad the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country.”
He later voted to codify those surveillance powers into Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 and backed every major reauthorization since.
For most of his career, Graham treated Section 702 like a sacred text.
Hellbound and Down 