DOJ Records Show Jack Smith Team Used Urgent Purchase Exception for Forensic Video Software Before T

WASHINGTON — Former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office invoked an urgent purchasing exception to obtain forensic video software in July 2023 after an internal official initially warned that bypassing the office’s stricter-than-normal procurement process would have to be defended, newly released Justice Department records show.

Breitbart News reported Monday that the documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Oversight Project and released as Smith prepares to testify Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The records provide a detailed look at the office’s rush to acquire Axon Investigate software during the period between Smith’s two federal indictments of Donald Trump in 2023.

The documents establish that Smith’s staff regarded the purchase as urgent. They also show, however, that the underlying purchase itself had already received approval and funding certification when officials allowed it to proceed before completion of one step in the office’s normal financial-management process. The released records do not identify which investigation, videos or audio files prompted the urgency.

The procurement trail began June 26, 2023, when personnel supporting Smith’s office sought information about Axon Investigate for use “for converting all types of video and audio files including lots of proprietary types we receive.”

The released correspondence does not identify those “proprietary” files or establish whether they related to Smith’s classified-documents investigation, his investigation into efforts surrounding the 2020 presidential election or another evidentiary matter.

Justice Department technology personnel followed up with Axon on June 28 and June 29, asking whether they had located the correct version for federal government systems and seeking licensing information.

Axon responded that “[w]e do not publish the cost of licenses/software,” and said it would prepare a price quote.

The government continues to redact pricing information from the released material under FOIA exemptions protecting Axon commercial information, leaving the public unable to determine from those documents exactly how much the Special Counsel’s Office paid.

Smith’s overall investigations were far more expensive. Fox News later estimated that his two federal Trump investigations “likely” cost taxpayers more than $50 million, based on Justice Department expenditure reports and an estimate for a reporting period that had not yet been publicly released.

Official DOJ reports show approximately $9.25 million in direct and supporting costs during Smith’s first reporting period, about $14.66 million during the next six months and approximately $11.84 million from October 2023 through March 2024. The $50 million figure reported by Fox was therefore an extrapolation rather than a final audited total for the investigation.

By July 12, 2023, Smith’s office was pressing Axon to complete the sale quickly.

“We received your quote for the [redacted] licenses for the Axon Investigates software and we would like to proceed with the purchase,” a Special Counsel’s Office records officer wrote.

The official asked that the hardware license devices be sent by overnight delivery to Smith’s office at 950 Pennsylvania Ave. NW in Washington.

“We are in desperate need of this software and want to have it installed as soon as possible. Let us know if there are any problems or questions,” the records officer wrote.

The following morning, July 13, Axon federal inside sales representative Christina Zeman responded.

“[p]leasure meeting you. I will be assisting with placing your order,” she wrote, adding that she looked “forward to working with you.”

But the transaction then encountered an internal procedural issue.

Ariel McIntyre, executive officer in Smith’s office, questioned whether staff were following the special counsel’s approved purchasing policy.

“As Jack [Smith] mentioned in our budget briefing, he supports more strict requirements than DOJ’s standard policies,” McIntyre wrote.

She then laid out the office’s normal purchase process. Under that procedure, a purchase-card holder was supposed to prepare designated portions of a procurement form and submit it to the appropriate allottee, budget officer and financial specialist. Funds would then be committed and obligated, the purchase approved and the form signed before the cardholder completed the transaction.

“We will have to defend not following the process below if we deviate from it prior to revising the policy,” McIntyre wrote. “I’m not ok with that.”

In another message, McIntyre wrote that she needed “to crack down on our processes” and had “a lot less leeway in the audit now that I have staff.”

The released correspondence does not explain what specific audit McIntyre was referencing.

Later that morning, however, the office approved a narrower exception that allowed the transaction to move forward.

A July 13 email states that McIntyre was “authorized to make this purchase prior to creating the UFMS obligation” because her government purchase-card alias was not yet linked to her Unified Financial Management System account “and the purchase is urgent.”

The Unified Financial Management System is the Justice Department’s accounting and financial-management platform, used to record obligations, expenditures and other financial transactions. The user-supplied DOJ description of the system is available here.

The same internal email is significant because it states that “the purchase itself has already been approved and funds certification has been provided both via email and electronically in UFMS at the commitment stage.”

It also said the Special Counsel’s Office would link the purchase-card alias to the appropriate UFMS identifiers and “re-evaluate the micro-purchase process for more efficiency while maintaining appropriate internal controls.”

That language provides additional context to Breitbart’s characterization that the office “bent its own purchasing rules.”

The records do show that Smith’s office authorized the purchase before completing the normal UFMS-obligation sequence described in its internal policy. But the same records also say the transaction had already been approved and its funds certified. The documents released so far do not establish that the purchase itself lacked legal authorization or that federal procurement law was violated.

On July 14, Zeman notified Smith’s staff that Axon had received the transaction.

“[r]eceived and I have submitted your order,” she wrote.

Breitbart reported that Axon subsequently shipped license dongles needed to operate the software. Its account says they were shipped “five days later on July 15,” although July 15 was one day after the July 14 order-submission email, creating an apparent date inconsistency in that description. The released excerpts reviewed for this article confirm the urgency and order submission but do not independently resolve that discrepancy.

The software acquisition occurred between Smith’s two 2023 indictments of Trump.

On June 8, a federal grand jury in Florida indicted Trump in Smith’s classified-documents investigation. Smith publicly announced the case June 9 and said his office would seek a speedy trial while emphasizing that Trump was presumed innocent.

On Aug. 1, a separate federal grand jury in Washington indicted Trump on four counts connected with alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and obstruct certification of the electoral vote.

Smith again said the indictment contained allegations that would have to be proven in court.

“The indictment is only an allegation and that the defendant must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law,” Smith said at the time.

The proximity between the Axon purchase and the Aug. 1 indictment has generated questions from Smith’s critics about what evidence required the software so urgently.

The records released so far do not answer that question.

Axon Investigate is forensic video software used by law-enforcement and prosecutorial agencies to review, convert and prepare video evidence. Other government agencies have described it as software capable of reviewing footage and preparing video exhibits for court, and contemporaneous law-enforcement records show it being used to concatenate or convert proprietary surveillance-video formats.

But neither the DOJ records nor Breitbart’s report establish which specific Trump-related evidence, if any, was processed using the newly purchased licenses.

One possibility raised by the timing is surveillance evidence, because federal investigators obtained video from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property during the classified-documents investigation. But the documents do not connect the Axon purchase to that material, and doing so without additional evidence would be speculative.

The procurement paperwork contains another provision that has drawn scrutiny.

Axon’s quote incorporated its Customer Experience Improvement Program, which at the time included “sharing of de-identified segments of Agency Content with Axon to develop new products.”

The quoted agreement says the program could allow Axon to make limited use of agency content after applying privacy-preserving techniques, subject to its contractual data-security and privacy requirements.

The DOJ records released publicly include a signature page that appears unsigned, according to Breitbart’s review. The purchase-card form reportedly describes the acquisition only as “Investigation software” and contains blank funding and signature portions in the released copy.

At the same time, internal correspondence says the purchase form “is signed,” suggesting that a completed version existed even though that version was not included in the public material described by Breitbart.

The available records therefore leave several questions unresolved: the exact price, which evidentiary files prompted the purchase, whether Smith’s office used the software in one or both Trump investigations, what happened to the project files after the Special Counsel’s Office closed and whether any agency content was ever shared with Axon under the customer-improvement provision.

The records have surfaced immediately before Smith’s scheduled appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The committee has scheduled a hearing for 9 a.m. Tuesday titled “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters.” Smith is listed as the sole witness. The hearing title reflects the Republican-led committee’s framing of its investigation; allegations of abuse will be among the matters under congressional examination.

Smith has consistently defended the integrity of his work.

When Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed him special counsel in November 2022, Smith said he intended to conduct the investigations “independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice.”

“The pace of the investigations will not pause or flag under my watch,” Smith said. “I will exercise independent judgement and will move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate.”

Garland appointed Smith to oversee both the investigation into interference with the transfer of presidential power following the 2020 election and the investigation involving classified documents and possible obstruction at Mar-a-Lago.

Neither federal case ultimately went to trial.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified-documents prosecution in July 2024, ruling that Smith’s appointment as special counsel violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause and that his office was improperly funded. Smith appealed.

After Trump won the November 2024 presidential election, prosecutors abandoned the appeal as to Trump, and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed it. Smith separately moved to dismiss the Washington election case because of the Justice Department’s longstanding position that a sitting president cannot be federally prosecuted.

The source material describes a federal judge as having thrown out Smith’s “business records case,” but Smith did not prosecute Trump’s New York business-records case. That state prosecution was brought separately by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Smith’s dismissed Florida prosecution concerned classified documents and alleged obstruction.

Trump had pleaded not guilty to the federal charges and denied wrongdoing.

Smith resigned from the Justice Department in January 2025 after completing his work, shortly before Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

His final report on the election case said the Washington prosecution was dismissed because Trump’s election created a constitutional barrier to continuing a federal criminal prosecution once he returned to office, rather than because prosecutors had concluded that the evidence was insufficient.

The political disputes surrounding the investigations continued after they ended.

A December 2024 Washington Post report said then-President Joe Biden had privately expressed regret over selecting Garland as attorney general, complaining that the department had moved too slowly in prosecuting Trump while aggressively prosecuting Biden’s son Hunter. Breitbart subsequently reported Biden’s dissatisfaction with Garland. The account was based on unnamed people familiar with Biden’s private comments.

The newly released Axon records add a different type of question to the continuing congressional examination of Smith’s office — not about the legal theory behind the prosecutions, but about the mechanics of how investigators acquired and handled evidence.

On their face, the records show an office moving with unusual urgency.

Staff first sought a tool capable of converting multiple types of video and audio. Weeks later, a records officer said the office was “in desperate need of this software.” Smith’s executive officer then objected to deviating from a stricter internal procurement process before authorizing a transaction “prior to creating the UFMS obligation” because of the urgency and a technical issue involving the purchase card.

But the same authorization also records that the acquisition had already been approved and the funds certified.

The unresolved issue is what made the software so urgent in July 2023 — and whether the answer can be found in records that have not yet been released.

That question is likely to attract additional attention as Smith appears before senators Tuesday to answer broader questions about how his office conducted its investigations of Trump.