(Zero Hedge)—Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and fifteen colleagues sent a letter to Verizon on Thursday demanding the telecom giant explain how a 2023 grand jury subpoena tied to Jack Smith’s “Arctic Frost” investigation vanished from its own paperwork for more than two years – only to resurface after the company chalked the omission up to “human error.”
The letter, addressed to Verizon CEO Dan Schulman, is the latest turn in Grassley’s monthslong excavation of Arctic Frost – the Biden-era FBI/DOJ probe-turned-Trump-prosecution that has already produced a House criminal referral for Smith himself, revelations that his team accessed the actual text messages of 44 lawmakers, and now a fight over what one of the country’s largest phone companies knew and sat on.
What Subpoena?
Back in October 2023, Grassley asked Verizon to search its files for every DOJ or federal law enforcement request touching Senate devices between January 2016 and October 2023, part of his long-running Crossfire Hurricane oversight. Verizon wrote back that it generally keeps legal process on file for four years and had no records predating October 2019.
What it didn’t mention: a May 25, 2023 grand jury subpoena issued by Smith’s Arctic Frost team for senators’ phone toll records, including two numbers belonging to the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms.
Congress didn’t learn the subpoena existed until 2025, when Verizon told Grassley’s office the 2023 omission came down to “human error.” Grassley isn’t satisfied with that. His new letter wants to know whether Verizon actually found the subpoena during its 2023 search and stayed quiet, or genuinely missed a live federal legal demand sitting in its own compliance files for two years.
Two of the numbers swept up in that May 2023 subpoena weren’t just any senators’ lines – they belonged to the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Under a contract Verizon signed with the Senate in May 2022, that’s supposed to trigger automatic notice to the SAA any time a Senate device or line gets subpoenaed. Grassley’s letter effectively asks how a contractually mandated notification simply never happened.
There’s also a significant timing gap to explain. The gag orders that typically accompany these subpoenas run about a year. If a standard gag applied here, it would have lifted by mid-2024 – well over a year before Verizon finally volunteered the “human error” explanation in 2025. Once free to speak, nothing stopped Verizon from coming forward. It didn’t, until Grassley’s office came asking.
What Grassley wants – and by when
The letter, co-signed by Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) and fourteen other senators, demands Verizon:
- Disclose the exact dates Schulman, Hans Vestberg, Craig Silliman, and Vandana Venkatesh were first told about the May 2023 subpoena
- Turn over internal records from May 2023 through October 2025 discussing whether Verizon believed it had a duty to notify Congress or the SAA
- Explain, in more than two words, what “human error” actually means
Verizon has until August 13 to respond. (Schulman only took over as CEO in October 2025, meaning he wasn’t at the helm for either the original subpoena or Verizon’s flawed 2023 response – which is exactly why senators want to know precisely when he was personally briefed.)
Twelve of the sixteen senators who signed the letter – Grassley included – had their own phone toll records or text messages swept up by Smith’s investigators. For most of the people demanding answers here, this isn’t abstract oversight.
Other Carriers In The Crosshairs
Verizon isn’t the only carrier under scrutiny. Grassley and Johnson’s joint oversight has identified more than 400 Republican individuals and organizations swept into the broader Arctic Frost dragnet – including, per Grassley’s disclosures, Turning Point USA, founded by the late Charlie Kirk. Separately, the two chairmen have tallied 84 Arctic Frost-related subpoenas sent specifically to Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, ten of which sought toll records for 20 sitting or former GOP members of Congress.
Notably, Verizon complied with Smith’s subpoenas while AT&T pushed back – a contrast Senate Judiciary Republicans have highlighted approvingly. The subpoenas were accompanied by gag orders signed by Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee who has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration on unrelated matters. The House Judiciary Committee, under Chairman Jim Jordan, has opened its own parallel probe into the telecoms.
Smith, for his part, has called the entire controversy overblown, maintaining his office’s collection was lawful and noting that special counsel Robert Hur similarly obtained President Biden’s toll records, and that DOJ under Trump’s first term seized phone records belonging to Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.
Last month we reported on DOJ records showing Smith’s team bypassed the department’s own privilege-screening “filter team” and directly accessed text messages between 44 members of Congress – from both parties – and Trump White House officials including Mark Meadows and Kash Patel, in apparent tension with Smith’s own sworn testimony that his office sought “just toll records.” Weeks later, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan escalated matters further, referring Smith to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution over the same records dispute.
Verizon’s August 13 deadline will determine whether this becomes another entry on Grassley’s growing pile of unanswered questions, or the start of the same reckoning AT&T and T-Mobile executives already faced before the Judiciary Subcommittee earlier this year. Either way, sixteen senators – a dozen of whom found their own names in Jack Smith’s files – aren’t inclined to let it drop.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
