Schmitt claims ‘Arctic Frost’ is worse than Watergate — let’s debunk that | Opinion
The insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, was a crime. The investigation of it was not.
We shouldn’t have to say that at this late date, but President Donald Trump’s allies — including, notably, Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri — are trying to rewrite history. We mustn’t let them.
Schmitt was a prominent part of a GOP press conference on Wednesday that criticized the FBI investigation into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election — an inquiry that, reasonably, focused on Republican figures such as Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley who aided in that attempt by baselessly objecting to the certification of rightful Electoral College votes for Joe Biden.
In the GOP’s telling, though, that investigation (code-named “Arctic Frost”) is nothing short of a scandal, a weaponization of the government by then-President Biden against Trump and his backers.
“I can’t think of a bigger political scandal in the last 100 years,” Schmitt said. “So if you want to compare it to Watergate, this is 100 times worse than Watergate.”
That’s just not true.
“Watergate was about using federal resources to steal an election. Arctic Frost was about investigating an attempt to steal an election,” Gregg Nunziata, a conservative attorney who worked in the Justice Department under George W. Bush, wrote on X. “So, no, this isn’t Biden’s Watergate.”
The differences seem pretty clear.
‘Time to get serious’
The irony in all of this is that Schmitt just one day prior led a Senate hearing in which he once again charged that the left is the source of pretty much all political violence these days.
“But let’s be clear about where the majority of this violence is coming from — the left,” he wrote Wednesday on X. “Enough of this both sides bulls***. It’s time to get serious.”
Once again: That’s not true, and Schmitt’s tough-guy social media profanity doesn’t make it so.
Schmitt’s “get serious” statement ignores the racist 2015 massacre at Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina. It omits the 2017 car attack on anti-Confederate protesters at Charlottesville, Virginia, that killed one person and injured 35 others. It overlooks the 2022 Buffalo, New York, grocery store massacre by a white gunman who believed in the antisemitic “Great Replacement” theory, the 2019 El Paso,Texas, Walmart mass murder by a white nationalist who killed 23 people and the 2018 Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania, synagogue slaughter by another antisemite angry about immigration. And it glides right by last summer’s assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker, as well as last April’s arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence.
What an awful, bloody decade it has been. God help us.
More to the point, Schmitt’s assertion can only be true if you erase the shocking violence of the Jan. 6 insurrection from American memory.
That’s what Trump tried to do when he pardoned more than 1,200 rioters convicted of crimes connected to the insurrection.
And it is what Schmitt is doing: smearing the justified investigation of Trump’s assault on democracy while simultaneously — and disingenuously — turning the spotlight toward anti-conservative violence.
Getting the facts straight
Listen, arguing about who started a fight is a good way to avoid resolving it — and a good way to avoid taking responsibility for your side’s actions.
In the spirit of truth, then, let’s acknowledge that the murder of conservative celebrity Charlie Kirk was horrific. That the killing of a health insurance executive in New York last December was similarly horrendous. That the mood among a lot of anti-Trump Americans is increasingly dark, terrifying and even sometimes violent. The violence is wrong, and I won’t try to excuse any of it.
I suspect, though, that the vast majority of Americans — left or right — aren’t much interested in living through a bloody civil war.
I also suspect that Schmitt isn’t much interested in the facts.
On Wednesday, he posted a video to X — pinned to the top of his account — in which he blamed “the left” for “organized, coordinated political terror.” One of the first images in that video was of the deadly 2025 New Year’s Day Tesla Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas.
That incident, of course, was the act of a suicidal Special Forces soldier with a history of post-traumatic stress disorder whose final letters praised Trump and declared the need to “get the Dems out of the fed government and military by any means necessary.”
The explosion had zero to do with lefty politics, in other words. Schmitt’s video is misleading.
And it sure exemplifies the senator’s partisan, hyperbolic approach to the twin topics of Jan. 6 and political violence. Schmitt wants Americans to “get serious.” He wants to hold Watergate-style hearings “for months.” He wants to lay blame for violence at the feet of Democrats and their supporters. But he can’t — or won’t — even get the facts straight.
This story was originally published October 30, 2025 at 11:53 AM.
