United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) appeared on Fox News’ America’s Newsroom to discuss concerns regarding the Justice Department under President Joe Biden and its alleged surveillance of sitting senators. Hagerty, who serves on the Senate Appropriations and Foreign Relations Committees and is a former U.S. Ambassador to Japan, addressed both the surveillance issue and ongoing disputes over government funding.
During the interview, Hagerty criticized Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats for what he described as “shutdown theater.” He stated, “Later today, the Democrats are going vote for the sixth time to keep the government shut down. This is all part of their grand theater. This is Chuck Schumer’s goal to keep us shut down till the 18th of October, when he brings all the radicals to DC to March on Washington in their No Kings March. This is supposedly to complain about the threat to democracy that [President Donald] Trump and the Republicans present. Look at the threat to democracy here. Where were they complaining about what the Biden Justice Department did to us, surveilling eight U.S. Senators? We’re going to get to the bottom of it. This goes all the way back to [former President Barack] Obama as well. I was a private citizen then, one of Trump’s finance chairmen. I moved into Trump Tower the day after the election in 2016. The FBI came up and surveilled us, then under the false Russia hoax pretext. Now we find out that they were surveilling us in 2023 with Jack Smith. I think the American people can see right through this. The real threat to democracy is Chuck Schumer and the Democrats. They’re projecting this, and they’re having this march, and they’re going to keep the government shut down at a cost of $400 million a day. We’re already at $3.2 billion and counting just so Chuck Schumer can create this theater. It’s a farce and we’ve got to stop all of it.”
Hagerty also discussed what he sees as constitutional concerns related to alleged DOJ surveillance activities: “You would think this could be a real turning point because of the constitutional implications of what you just discussed. You have the executive branch snooping on the legislative branch. But the partisanship here is so bad. Again, Schumer’s willing to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people just for his partisan purposes. So, you know, I wish we could get there. But the fact is that they’re not willing to call out the Obama administration and the Biden administration for what they did and somehow project those practices onto the Trump administration and onto us Republicans.”
He further claimed that lawmakers targeted by surveillance had no involvement in criminal activity or threats: “The eight senators and the congressman who were surveilled had nothing to do with any sort of criminal activity or a threat to democracy. It was the Democrats going after President Trump’s allies, those of us who stood with him. Again, I’ve been with him since being his finance chairman as a private citizen, serving in his administration in the first term, and now as a U.S. Senator. If they can do it to me, a sitting U.S. Senator, they could do it to you. They could do it to anybody. What else has this Biden administration done? What else have they done to destroy the American people’s faith in our law enforcement institutions?”
