Exclusive | Harmeet Dhillon tells ‘Pod Force One’ the FBI ‘spied’ on her in Arctic Frost probe

The Department of Justice’s civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon revealed that she was one of hundreds of Republicans targeted by former President Joe Biden FBI as part of the notorious “Arctic Frost” probe during an interview on “Pod Force One” released Wednesday.

In an interview with podcast host and Post columnist Miranda Devine, Dhillon discussed how as a veteran conservative lawyer she had been involved in many cases brought by Biden’s Department of Justice — but she was outraged to learn the FBI “spied” on her as part of a 2020 election interference case.

“There’s almost never an excuse to pierce a lawyer’s privilege,” the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division said of her work defending Project Veritas for obtaining the diary of Ashley Biden.

“And yet, we’ve seen this Department of Justice and the prior ones, go after many lawyers, go after their communications with their clients, and my law firm represented the former president and his campaign and my law firm’s name, The Dhillon Law Group, is repeatedly mentioned in the Arctic Frost disclosures as a target of these communications.”

“They spied on you?” asked Devine.

“Yes,” Dhillon responded. “We were part of the investigative targets, and that’s because we represented the Republican National Committee, and we represented the Trump campaign, and we represented some of the other MAGA entities. And so, I mean, we’re all over the place there. As are several other law firms of current DOJ officials.”

She added that Trump’s DOJ was “going to get to the bottom of that at some point.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released declassified FBI files on Arctic Frost in October, characterizing it as a “fishing expedition” to “improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus.”

More than 430 GOP individuals and entities were caught up in the dragnet of the investigation, which began in late 2022.

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In May 2023, nearly a dozen members of Congress also had their private cell phone logs subpoenaed by then-special counsel Jack Smith to see who they were communicating with over the days preceding and following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of those members who had their cell metadata taken without his knowledge, and others have since called for DC US District Chief Judge James Boasberg to be impeached for signing off on the subpoenas.

A provision tucked into a stopgap government funding bill last month also allowed senators to sue the DOJ for up to $500,000 if their call logs were seized.

Some communications related to the Project Veritas case obtained by Biden’s DOJ were also legally privileged meaning they constituted private conversations between an attorney, in this case Dhillon, and her clients.

“It’s outrageous to investigate lawyers and their communications and say that there’s no privilege, because they teach you this in law school, you have to think about, from a jurisprudence perspective, what if the tables were turned?” noted Dhillon.

“So they tell you to think about this from the veil of ignorance, and how would you feel about this if the parties were flipped or the facts were flipped? So, the piercing of privilege is hugely problematic, and that’s another sacred thing in our culture.”

The assistant AG accused Biden’s officials of perpetrating and unprecedented and “gross abuse of power” in doing so. It’s unclear whether similarly privileged communications related to Arctic Frost were obtained as well.

“No one’s been told that this happened. We just, if your phone starts acting funny and things like that, you just assume it. And so, it’s just kind of very chilling that you have that,” Dhillon claimed.

“This was the culture,” she said of Biden’s DOJ. “I’m not going to comment on ongoing investigations, but it’s been publicly noted that there were documents concealed in burn bags and there were documents at the FBI, and you have James Comey using an alias email to communicate, and giving himself a title of a philosopher to do that, and it’s kind of insane type of an arrogance that we’ve seen.”