Jack Smith thought he was done answering for what his team did to President Donald Trump.
Turns out the investigation into the investigator is just getting started.
And House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan just dropped a 57-page report that puts the entire Biden-era Justice Department machine squarely back in the hot seat.
What Jordan’s Report Actually Says
House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is accusing former special counsel Jack Smith and the former Biden administration of trying to “sway” the 2024 election with the Department of Justice probe into President Donald Trump and his allies.
Jordan’s committee released a new 57-page report arguing that Smith and his team “ran roughshod over key constitutional protections” and that the former Democrat White House used “the DOJ as a weapon against its political opponents.”
The accusations aren’t vague. They’re detailed, sourced, and backed by sworn testimony from Smith’s own prosecutors.
“The Special Counsel’s prosecutors tried to silence President Trump with unlawful gag orders, threatened defense attorneys, mishandled key documents, and broke protocol to release a massive trove of alleged evidence just weeks before the presidential election to sway public opinion,” the report said.
Read that again. Broke protocol. Weeks before the election. To sway public opinion.
If that’s what happened, it’s not a legal technicality. It’s a direct assault on the democratic process, carried out by the permanent law enforcement bureaucracy against the candidate who ultimately won in a landslide.
The Arctic Frost Surveillance Operation
“The Biden-Harris Administration, including Special Counsel Smith, ran roughshod over key constitutional protections to spy on Republican Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate,” the committee concluded.
The FBI and the DOJ accessed the phone records of 17 Republican members of Congress in an investigation into the 2020 election codenamed “Arctic Frost.” Gag orders prevented the targets from learning they had been spied on for years.
As many as 44 members of Congress in both the House and Senate had the contents of their text messages gathered by Smith’s team, Republicans have said.
Forty-four. Both chambers. And they weren’t told. The gag orders made sure of that.
“Internal documents show that Arctic Frost investigators, and later Smith’s team, had only limited, perfunctory discussions with subject-matter experts in DOJ’s Public Integrity Section about the constitutionality of these seizures,” the report said. “Although PIN cautioned that the subpoenas could be unconstitutional, PIN approved them nonetheless, asserting there was little ‘litigation risk’ because the gag orders that accompanied the subpoenas would prevent Members from ever discovering” them.
That last part tells you everything. The lawyers inside the Justice Department’s own Public Integrity Section raised constitutional red flags. Smith’s team plowed ahead anyway, banking on the secrecy orders to keep Congress in the dark.
The report highlights investigators’ acquisition of roughly two and a half years of phone records belonging to Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. Former Assistant Special Counsel Timothy Duree testified that the extended period was useful in understanding Jordan’s communications “networks,” according to the report.
Jordan himself. The chairman of the committee overseeing DOJ oversight. His own phone records, pulled for years, to map who he talked to.
Duree alternately claimed that obtaining nearly two years of Jordan’s phone records was necessary to map his “networks,” or were a “mistake.” And Senior Assistant Special Counsel Molly Gaston quibbled with whether a congressional vote to certify a presidential election was an “obvious” official legislative act, and therefore protected under the Constitution.
A mistake. That’s the defense. A two-and-a-half-year sweep of the House Judiciary Chairman’s phone records was just a mistake.
Smith’s Own Team Described a Probe Unlike Any Other
Brian Burnett, a veteran law enforcement agent, told the committee that prosecutors handed him phone numbers to subpoena without telling him whose numbers they were. Asked directly what information he was given, his answer was two words: “Just phone numbers.” He said that in thirty years of law enforcement he had never worked with prosecutors directing investigative steps in the manner Smith’s team did.
“A normal investigation would be, I would do the investigation, become familiar with everything, you know, do grand jury subpoenas, do the normal investigative process, follow the normal investigative steps. But, in this case, those steps were given to us by the prosecution team,” an excerpt from Burnett’s testimony showed.
That testimony matters. Burnett isn’t a partisan. He spent years inside the DOJ inspector general’s office. He described the structure of Smith’s operation as something he had simply never seen before in three decades of law enforcement. The prosecution was running the investigation, top-down, handing numbers to agents without identifying whose phones they were targeting.
The new revelations focus especially on communications gathered from Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., the only lawmaker who had his phone seized as a part of the investigation.
And Smith has stood by his team’s findings and maintained his innocence amid a barrage of GOP attacks. In his testimony to Republicans, he laid blame on Trump for prosecutors collecting GOP lawmakers’ records.
“I made my decisions in the investigation without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election,” Smith told members of the House Judiciary Committee in the December 17 interview.
But the committee’s own documents — emails, testimony from Smith’s prosecutors, internal DOJ communications — tell a different story.
What This Pattern Actually Reveals
Jordan referred Smith to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution over what he alleged were false statements during Smith’s deposition. Jordan wrote in a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche that Smith “seemingly made willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact that contradict new documents” the Senate Judiciary Committee obtained.
Several Republican actions are described in the available materials: the House Judiciary Committee’s release of transcripts from interviews with five former Smith prosecutors; Jordan’s criminal referral to the Justice Department over statements Smith made during a deposition; and Senator Tom Cotton’s request for an election-interference investigation.
This isn’t the first time the permanent Washington law enforcement apparatus has been accused of weaponizing its authority against Trump and his allies. The pattern here — selective prosecution, constitutional guardrails brushed aside, gag orders used to bury the evidence of the operation itself — fits the same playbook used to harass Trump for years.
The Speech or Debate Clause exists for exactly this reason. The Founders understood that an executive branch with unchecked power to investigate and surveil the legislative branch is an executive branch that can intimidate, coerce, and neutralize the very representatives the people sent to check it.
“The Speech or Debate Clause protects not only legislators, but American citizens too. It guarantees that the people’s representatives in Congress may advocate effectively on their constituents’ behalf without the threat of interference or intimidation by the Executive Branch,” the report argued.
Smith’s team, by the committee’s account, treated that guarantee as a litigation risk to be managed rather than a constitutional principle to be honored.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has spent more than a year releasing records and conducting oversight of the investigation. Grassley’s work and Jordan’s report together represent the most comprehensive picture yet of how the Biden-era DOJ conducted itself. The more documents that come out, the worse it looks.
The committee cited its findings in calling for additional protections for congressional communications. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., introduced the Congressional Records Protection Act of 2026 in June.
But the bill, the Congressional Records Protection Act, advanced through the House Judiciary Committee but has so far not gotten a House floor vote.
That’s a real question worth asking. A bill designed to prevent exactly the kind of warrantless surveillance of elected representatives that Smith’s team allegedly carried out is sitting there, passed through committee, and House leadership hasn’t moved it. The same leadership that claims to oppose the deep-state tactics documented in Jordan’s report.
The American people who sent Trump back to Washington in 2024 have a legitimate interest in knowing whether the federal agencies they fund were turned against a presidential candidate and the legislators allied with him. Jordan’s 57-page report says they were. Smith says he did nothing wrong. The evidence is starting to pile up on one side of that argument, and it isn’t Smith’s.
Source: Fox News, “Explosive new report puts Jack Smith back in hot seat as Jim Jordan alleges he tried to ‘sway’ 2024 election”