A new House Judiciary Committee staff report alleges that the Justice Department and Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained phone records from at least 17 Republican lawmakers and received text-message content involving 44 members of Congress while failing to adequately protect material covered by legislative privilege.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
The House Judiciary Committee released a sweeping interim report Wednesday alleging that federal investigators crossed constitutional boundaries while pursuing the Arctic Frost investigation and Special Counsel Jack Smith’s subsequent prosecution of President Donald Trump, including by obtaining telephone records belonging to Republican lawmakers and receiving potentially privileged text-message content involving dozens of members of Congress.
The Republican-led committee’s conclusions, detailed in a newly released Just the News report, represent congressional findings rather than a judicial determination that the Justice Department or Smith violated the Constitution. The committee said its investigation drew on tens of thousands of pages of documents, subpoenas, interviews and depositions collected during several years of oversight.
“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.
“Contemporaneous documents and testimony to the Committee reveal a deliberate assault by the Biden-Harris DOJ on fundamental separation of powers between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch,” the report added.
According to the 57-page interim staff report, investigators obtained telephone records associated with at least 17 Republican members of Congress between April 2022 and May 2023. Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and current House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan were among the lawmakers whose records were obtained, the committee said.
The subpoenas were accompanied in some instances by gag orders that prevented lawmakers from learning that their records had been obtained, according to the committee. Because prosecutors sought the subpoenas and related orders through proceedings in which the lawmakers were not present, the report argues that members had no meaningful opportunity at the time to contest the government’s actions.
The committee said those actions violated the Speech or Debate Clause of Article I of the Constitution, which protects lawmakers from being “questioned in any other place” for legislative acts and is intended to preserve Congress’ independence from interference by the executive and judicial branches.
In the report’s words, “the Biden-Harris Administration violated the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, a core provision that protects the official actions and communications of Members of Congress and immunizes them from prosecution for legislative acts.”
The committee ultimately characterized the Justice Department’s conduct as having “disregarded the separation of powers to spy on their political opposition.”
Smith has disputed the committee’s interpretation of the constitutional issue. During congressional testimony, he said he was unaware of any Supreme Court or D.C. Circuit precedent holding that obtaining noncontent telephone toll records from a third party violates the Speech or Debate Clause. He also said the lawmakers whose records were collected were not the targets of his investigation and distinguished those records from the seizure of substantive legislative material.
That disagreement is central to the committee’s inquiry because telephone toll records ordinarily identify information such as when calls occurred, their duration and the numbers involved rather than the contents of the conversations.
The first FBI records disclosed by congressional investigators in 2025 showed that investigators had conducted toll-record analysis involving eight Republican senators and one Republican House member in connection with Arctic Frost. The records covered information about calls but not the contents of those calls.
Subsequent disclosures expanded the known scope of the records collection. Jordan later said the Biden-era Justice Department had obtained telephone records associated with his number covering more than two years.
The committee’s latest findings go beyond toll records.
According to the report, Smith’s team also received from the National Archives and Records Administration text messages sent or received by as many as 44 members of Congress. The committee said some of those messages may have contained material protected by legislative privilege.
The Justice Department had established a filter team to examine incoming material and separate potentially privileged information before investigators reviewed it, according to the committee. The new report alleges, however, that the text messages in question reached Smith’s investigative team without first undergoing that screening process.
That discovery has also generated a dispute over Smith’s earlier congressional testimony.
Smith had responded “no” when asked whether his team requested the contents of lawmakers’ communications rather than toll records. Documents subsequently released by the committee indicated that his office nevertheless received text-message content from the National Archives, prompting some Republican lawmakers to raise the possibility of a perjury investigation. No perjury charge or judicial finding that Smith lied under oath has been made. The dispute turns in part on the distinction between whether Smith’s office specifically requested the messages and whether investigators ultimately received and reviewed them. The later documents concerning that discrepancy have become another focus of the committee’s oversight.
The broader Arctic Frost investigation also examined a much larger group of Trump allies and associates.
The committee later said that more than 160 Republicans were potentially investigated as part of Arctic Frost. Those identified in records included former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, Rep. Scott Perry, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, attorney John Eastman and former Rep. Mark Meadows, who later served as Trump’s White House chief of staff.
The Judiciary Committee expanded its inquiry by obtaining testimony from people who participated directly in the investigation.
One day before Wednesday’s report was released, the committee published transcripts from five former Smith prosecutors and former Justice Department inspector general Special Agent Brian Burnett. The witnesses included former prosecutors J.P. Cooney, Molly Gaston, Ray Hulser, Tad Duree and Thomas Windom.
Burnett’s testimony added another dimension to the dispute over congressional phone records.
The retired agent said he did not know that some of the telephone data he was helping prosecutors obtain through grand jury subpoenas belonged to members of Congress. He said he learned only after his retirement in late 2024 that one subpoena bearing his name apparently involved Jordan’s telephone number.
According to the account of Burnett’s testimony, he said he would have raised the matter with a supervisor and asked whether different procedures were necessary had he known whose records were involved. Burnett also said that during his decades with the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, he had not previously been asked to obtain congressional telephone data.
The controversy grew out of an investigation that began before Smith became special counsel.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith in November 2022 to oversee two ongoing criminal investigations involving Trump. One concerned alleged efforts to interfere with the transfer of presidential power following the 2020 election and certification of the Electoral College vote. The other concerned classified documents and presidential records found at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property and possible obstruction related to that investigation.
Trump was subsequently indicted in both matters. The prosecutions ultimately ended after his victory in the 2024 presidential election, and Smith later left the Justice Department. The department’s archived special counsel records include the indictments, later filings and Smith’s final report on the election case.
The FBI had searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property in August 2022 during the classified-documents investigation, several months before Garland placed Smith in charge of both federal probes.
Republicans have repeatedly alleged that the investigations were politically motivated and intended to interfere with Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Smith and his attorneys have rejected that characterization, maintaining that his prosecutorial decisions were based on facts and law rather than electoral considerations.
The committee’s latest report places particular emphasis on events that began before Smith’s appointment but continued after he assumed control of the investigations.
According to the report, internal discussions occurred with the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section over constitutional concerns surrounding congressional records. The committee alleges those discussions were inadequate and says officials proceeded with subpoenas despite acknowledging potential Speech or Debate Clause issues.
The House investigation has been releasing Arctic Frost material since 2025, gradually expanding the public record concerning the identities of lawmakers and other Republicans whose communications or records intersected with the investigation.
The committee describes Arctic Frost as part of a longer series of federal investigations involving Trump and people associated with him from 2016 through January 2025. The other investigations identified in the submitted account were Crossfire Hurricane, Round River and Plasmic Echo.
Wednesday’s report does not resolve the legal disagreement over whether obtaining lawmakers’ records from third parties violated constitutional protections, nor does it constitute a criminal judgment against Smith or other Justice Department officials.
It does, however, substantially expand the House Judiciary Committee’s account of how Arctic Frost handled congressional communications, alleging that investigators gathered toll records from at least 17 Republican lawmakers, received text-message content involving as many as 44 members and failed to consistently screen potentially privileged material before it reached prosecutors.
Those allegations — and Smith’s contrary position on whether the collection of noncontent third-party telephone records violated the Speech or Debate Clause — now form the core of an intensifying congressional dispute over the limits of executive-branch investigations involving sitting members of Congress.
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