Jack Smith built his reputation as an untouchable lawman. Now he may be the one facing prosecution.
Senator Josh Hawley went on Hannity recently and dropped a charge that stopped the conversation cold .
And now the House Judiciary Committee is weighing whether to send Smith’s name to the Justice Department for a criminal referral.
What Hawley Says Smith Did to His Phone
Bombshell new documents show Jack Smith spied on Republican lawmakers’ text messages as part of the January 6 witch hunt against President Trump.
Sean Hannity asked Hawley point-blank what Smith’s team actually got their hands on.
Hawley’s answer was detailed and damning. “Well, we know that he read my text messages,” Hawley said. “Yes, absolutely, Sean. He also tracked my phone. He tracked my whereabouts, my location, monitored my incoming calls and my outgoing calls.”
That’s not a vague accusation. That’s a sitting US Senator describing what he alleges was warrantless surveillance of an elected official by a special counsel appointed by Joe Biden’s Justice Department.
Hawley kept going. “What did he do with the text messages? We don’t know that yet. What we do know is he absolutely read them. He absolutely shared them with members of his team and all of that illegally.”
And then came the part that matters most legally. “The Justice Department requires that there be screening for any members of Congress [regarding] their text messages,” Hawley said. “Jack Smith said under oath that he didn’t seek the text messages of members of Congress, but in fact, we know that he did. So he lied, he violated the law, he violated the Constitution. This guy ought to be prosecuted.”
Looks like perjury. That’s not a political talking point — that’s what the evidence is pointing to, according to Hawley.
Operation Arctic Frost and the 44 Lawmakers Who Got Swept Up
Hawley wasn’t the only one caught in Smith’s net.
Records provided by the Trump Justice Department to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Senate Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) show that Smith’s team obtained and reviewed the text messages of 44 members of Congress, allegedly bypassing the required filter review process entirely.
The filter team existed for a reason. It was supposed to screen documents before investigators could read them, protecting attorney-client privilege and the constitutional rights of the people caught up in any probe.
Smith’s team allegedly skipped that step.
Grassley called the probe a “runaway train” of abuses of power. He and Johnson released their joint findings after a full-scale investigation into Operation Arctic Frost — the internal code name Smith’s team used for the effort to investigate President Donald Trump for alleged corruption and election malfeasance. Top Senate Republicans have called the operation “worse than Watergate.”
That comparison deserves some context. Watergate involved a break-in and a cover-up — and the Washington establishment used it to destroy a president they despised, with career bureaucrats leaking to friendly reporters to finish the job. What Smith allegedly ran was a surveillance dragnet aimed at elected members of Congress, conducted in secret, with a nondisclosure order sought from the courts to keep the targets from ever finding out.
The list of lawmakers whose texts were swept up reads like a who’s-who of Trump allies: Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK), House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), among others.
But here’s the part that should make even Democrats uncomfortable. Several Democrat members of Congress had their texts swept up too, including Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Representative Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ).
Grassley said he hopes his Democrat colleagues “finally put partisanship aside and recognize the severity of these actions.”
Don’t hold your breath.
Stefanik put it flatly: the new records prove Smith’s team “unlawfully and unconstitutionally accessed my private text messages, along with 43 other Members of Congress, in clear violation of the Constitution.”
The Constitution’s Speech and Debate Clause protects lawmakers from being questioned outside the Capitol for legislative acts. Courts have extended that protection to internal communications as technology has evolved. Smith’s team allegedly ignored all of it.
Jordan, Grassley, and the Push to Put Smith in the Dock
Jim Jordan told Hannity the House is actively weighing a criminal referral. “We’re already looking at that,” Jordan said. “Do we need to refer him to the Justice Department, to Attorney General Blanche, for them to go ahead and move forward with prosecution? We’re looking at that as we speak.”
Grassley separately said he plans to haul Smith back before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer for what the records show.
But there’s a broader question sitting underneath all of this. Smith testified under oath before Congress that he did not seek the text message content of members of Congress. The records now say otherwise. That’s not a disputed interpretation of legal procedure. That’s a factual conflict between sworn testimony and documentary evidence.
And it fits a pattern that anyone paying attention has seen before. The same institutions that spent years telling the country that Trump’s concerns about government surveillance were paranoid fantasies are now watching a former special counsel get accused of exactly the kind of warrantless domestic spying that critics warned about for years.
Senator Hawley has said he’s always been wary of the current FISA regime for precisely this reason. “The truth is that Americans’ personal information gets scooped up all the time,” he told reporters. The difference here is that the targets were sitting members of Congress — people with constitutional protections that even the Justice Department’s own protocols were supposed to shield.
Smith’s office has denied that his team spied on lawmakers. But the records released by the Trump Justice Department tell a different story, at least according to the senators reviewing them.
There’s also the question of what Smith did with what he found. Hawley admitted on air that the full picture isn’t known yet. What’s confirmed, he alleged, is that the messages were read and shared internally within Smith’s team — without the legal screening the DOJ’s own rules required.
The political press spent years treating Smith as a righteous crusader. He got a book deal. He gave speeches. He was cast as the last line of defense against a dangerous president.
Now a Republican senator who had his phone tracked and his texts read is calling for him to be prosecuted. The House Judiciary Committee is drafting a potential criminal referral. And the Senate Judiciary Committee is preparing to put him back under oath.
If the evidence holds up, the man who tried to put Donald Trump in prison may end up answering for crimes of his own. That’s not justice being politicized. That’s justice catching up.
Sources: Breitbart, Fox News, Just The News, The Federalist, Daily Caller