WASHINGTON, D.C. — Wyoming Republican U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman voted Wednesday to repeal the recently enacted provision of law that allows eight GOP senators, including Wyoming’s Cynthia Lummis, to sue the government for at least $500,000 apiece over the FBI’s spying on those senators in connection with the 2020 presidential election.
Hageman was part of a 426-0 House vote to repeal the provision, which the Senate added at the last minute to the bill that ended the federal government shutdown last week. The repeal is a standalone House measure sponsored by U.S. Rep. Austin Scott, R-Georgia, and the Senate must now decide what to do with it.
The Senate provision that the House repealed is a “self-centered, self-serving piece of language,” Scott said on the House floor Wednesday ahead of the vote.
Hageman, also in floor remarks, said that if senators feel wronged, they should pursue longstanding legal remedies that are available to all citizens. She cited the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.
“The senators, similar to any other citizen who was wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, already have a private right of action to sue the federal government, including the FBI and other agencies who may have been involved, for violation of their Fourth Amendment rights and other statutory provisions that govern privacy rights and/or that limit federal law enforcement from pursuing political witch hunts,” Hageman said.
Although no one dissented in Wednesday’s vote, which occurred around 7 p.m. in Wyoming, seven lawmakers did not cast votes.
‘Out Of Line’
Lummis and Wyoming U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, the second-ranking Senate Republican, had no comment Wednesday to Cowboy State Daily as the House was preparing to take up the measure.
Barrasso and a Lummis spokesman previously defended the provision, though the Lummis representative added that Lummis had not decided whether to sue to collect tax-funded monetary damages.
When the Senate passed its version of the shutdown-ending bill and House Republicans discovered the provision, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, said the add-on was “way out of line” and should be repealed.
House Republicans last week were put in the position of prolonging the shutdown by stripping the provision and sending the bill back to the Senate or ending the shutdown by passing the bill as amended by the Senate.
They chose the latter course, vowing to repeal the language on spying reparations with a new bill. Scott’s legislation is that vehicle, but Democrats noted its fate in the Senate is uncertain.
Arctic Frost
Lummis is one of eight senators named in a September 2023 FBI document revealing the agency collected phone records on her and seven other Republican senators. The document says the data collection was part of the Arctic Frost investigation, led by Special Counsel Jack Smith, which began in April 2022 and focused on communications made around the time of the Capitol riot Jan. 6, 2021.
Smith, in turn, became the subject of investigation by Senate Judiciary Committee member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who now chairs that panel. Last month, Grassley made public the FBI document, thus exposing the Biden administration’s spying on Lummis and colleagues in connection with whether senators would count certain states’ electoral college votes in 2020.
The senators have said they were simply doing their duty to ensure the election results were correct, not trying to overturn valid results.
When announcing the document, Grassley said the records collected were in the nature of metadata — such as dates of calls, call durations, and the phone numbers involved — but not the content of the calls.
The other senators whose phone records were harvested, according to the document, are U.S. Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, both of Tennessee, plus Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
Retroactive To 2022
The provision that the Senate inserted in the shutdown-ending bill changes surveillance law only for senators. It allows a minimum of $500,000 for each instance of surveillance of a senator without his or her knowledge.
It is retroactive to Jan. 1, 2022, about three months before Arctic Frost began, meaning senators surveilled at any time during Smith’s probe can sue.
House members of both parties have noted senators often use multiple phone and email addresses, so a single senator could get multiple half-million-dollar damage awards.
Most of the senators named in the FBI document have distanced themselves from the provision, saying either that it should be repealed or that they will not exercise their new legal right to sue the government.
Graham, though, has said he will maximize the amount he can get.
Earlier Lummis Statement
In the immediate wake of last week’s vote to end the shutdown, Lummis spokesman Joe Jackson issued a statement to Cowboy State Daily on the provision at issue. It says in full:
“Senator Lummis did not author this language. However, we won’t forget that the Justice Department and FBI under Joe Biden violated the Constitution’s separation of powers by spying on Republican United States senators, without their knowledge.
“These senators, including Senator Lummis, were surveilled by the Biden administration because they support President Trump and the America First agenda. We must not allow this politicization of federal agencies to become routine.
“Liquidated damages provisions are commonly used, and this provision is the only way to hold Jack Smith and wrongdoers accountable.”
But House Republicans are not persuaded, even though they, too, chided the Biden administration for its actions.
“Remember, Congress serves the American people, not the other way around,” said U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, R-Wisconsin, on the House floor.
Not A ‘Clean CR’
U.S. Rep. Joe Morelle, a New York Democrat, said it was ironic Senate Republicans added the provision into what was originally a clean continuing resolution, or CR, to merely extend government funding. The CR originated in the House.
Senate Democrats sought to add various provisions, including an Obamacare tax credit extension. None of that got in the bill, but the GOP’s senator spying language did.
Senate Republicans “insisted it had to be a clean CR. It had to be a clean continuing resolution, no other provisions,” Morelle said. “Somehow, this got in there. This wasn’t clean. There’s nothing clean about this.”
Anticipating the House passage Wednesday of the repeal bill, Morelle said the measure might not get through the other chamber.
“By the way, there’s no guarantee the Senate is going to take this up,” he said.
Sean Barry can be reached at sean@cowboystatedaily.com.
