Jack Smith Could Be In Trouble After Latest Revelation On Lawmaker Texts

House Republicans urged the Justice Department to prosecute former special counsel Jack Smith after new revelations that his team obtained text messages from dozens of members of Congress as part of their investigation into President Donald Trump. 

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a criminal referral Wednesday to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche accusing Smith of lying to lawmakers about the text messages. Documents released last week by Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) show that Smith’s investigative team accessed text messages involving 44 members of Congress, including both Republicans and Democrats, during their investigation into the 2020 election. 

“Mr. Smith and the Biden-Harris DOJ barely considered the Constitution as they seized these records of Congressional Republicans — and to the extent that they did, subject matter experts within DOJ warned that their subpoenas might be unconstitutional,” Jordan wrote to Blanche

Reacting to the news of the criminal referral, Trump questioned on Truth Social, “Justice at last???”

The records appear to indicate that Smith’s team bypassed a Justice Department “Filter Team” that had been established to review potentially privileged communications before investigators could access them.

Jordan said that the revelations appear to conflict with what Smith said during a December 2025 deposition when he told lawmakers that he did not request to see the content of lawmakers’ text messages. Smith claimed he only asked for data on information about the timing and where the texts were going. Jordan said that Smith could be prosecuted for making false statements to Congress based on this testimony. 

“In light of the new information detailing that Mr. Smith’s team did have access to content of Members’ text messages and the fact that Mr. Smith made false statements regarding this information during his deposition, suggests that he willingly and knowingly made false representations to the Committee,” Jordan said. 

Smith has disputed accusations he lied to lawmakers, with his lawyers saying that he was unimpeachably truthful” and accused Jordan of pushing an “unprecedented theory that Mr. Smith provided false testimony not because of what he said, but because of what he did not say.” 

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, argued that Smith was forthcoming because the texts involving the 44 lawmakers were obtained through requests to the National Archives, not subpoenas. He said that Jordan went after Smith “for not reading the minds of congressional investigators and for not volunteering information they didn’t ask for.”