House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department accusing former Special Counsel Jack Smith of lying under oath about his team's access to the private text messages of more than 40 members of Congress.
Jordan transmitted the referral late Wednesday to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, urging the DOJ to investigate whether Smith violated the federal law barring knowingly false statements to Congress. The move marks a sharp escalation in the Republican-led oversight of Smith's now-concluded investigations into former President Donald Trump, and it lands squarely on the question of whether Smith misled the committee to shield the scope of his probe from congressional scrutiny.
The referral centers on Smith's closed-door testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in December 2025. During that deposition, Smith told lawmakers that "toll records", telephone metadata, his team requested for members of Congress did not include the content of those members' messages. He also denied subpoenaing lawmakers' text messages. Jordan now contends both statements were false, based on records that surfaced weeks later.
The referral draws on material released by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley. Those records, which the Washington Examiner reported Grassley obtained from the DOJ, showed Smith's team reviewed text messages from 44 senators and representatives, 40 Republicans and four Democrats, as part of the investigation known internally as "Arctic Frost."
Smith's office did not obtain the texts through telecommunications providers. Instead, the messages came from the National Archives, which held White House records that included communications between lawmakers and White House staff sent between October 2020 and January 20, 2021. Ranking Member Jamie Raskin seized on that distinction to defend Smith, arguing his testimony was technically accurate because Smith's subpoena targeted National Archives records, not phone companies.
Jordan rejected that framing. In the referral, he wrote that Smith's answers created a false impression regardless of the subpoena's formal target.
"The responses provided by Mr. Smith gave the impression that neither Mr. Smith nor his team had access to the content of Members' privileged text messages. We now know this to be false."
That passage, from Jordan's letter as reported by the AP, frames the core accusation: that Smith's carefully worded denials amounted to a deliberate effort to conceal the true reach of his investigation from the committee charged with overseeing it.
The scale of Smith's investigative apparatus adds weight to the referral. His office issued 197 subpoenas, 34 to individuals and 163 to businesses, pulling records and communications related to more than 430 individuals and organizations. Sen. Ted Cruz put the scope in blunt terms.
"When you have the Biden Department of Justice subpoenaing 20% of the Republicans in the Senate, it is an egregious abuse of process."
That quote, carried by the Washington Examiner, captures the Republican argument that Smith's probe operated far beyond its stated mandate.
Jordan's referral also flagged a procedural breach. DOJ records obtained on July 14 indicated that Smith's investigators reviewed potentially privileged congressional communications before a "filter team", the internal safeguard designed to screen out legally protected material, had a chance to examine them. That bypass, if confirmed, would mean Smith's team read lawmakers' private messages without the standard protections DOJ policy requires.
Jordan cited 18 U.S.C. § 1001, the federal statute that makes it a crime to knowingly and willfully make materially false statements to Congress, as the New York Post detailed. His letter to Blanche described "strong evidence" that Smith "knowingly made false statements during his December 17, 2025, deposition."
Smith himself has not spoken publicly since the referral dropped. But his attorneys pushed back hard. In a statement reported by Fox News, lawyers for Smith called the referral an attempt to punish a public servant for doing his job.
"This referral reflects a chilling eagerness to weaponize the justice system by attacking a career, nonpartisan public servant who faithfully and fearlessly performed his duties."
The statement maintained that Smith's testimony was "truthful and responsive to the specific questions asked." That defense rests on a narrow reading: Smith answered what he was asked about toll records, and the text messages came through a different channel, the National Archives, so no false statement occurred.
Raskin, the committee's top Democrat and a former law professor, echoed that argument in sharper terms. He accused Jordan of distorting the record and said the referral amounted to punishing a witness for not volunteering information beyond the scope of the questions posed.
"Wishing that you had asked different questions while you had the opportunity to examine a witness is not a proper basis for a referral of a witness for criminal prosecution."
Raskin added: "The Republicans fault Mr. Smith for not reading the minds of congressional investigators and for not volunteering information they didn't ask for. This is absurd."
Jordan anticipated that defense. In the referral, as Just the News reported, he argued that a statement containing partial truth becomes "affirmatively false when it represents that the partial information is complete." In other words, Smith's technically accurate answers about toll records were misleading precisely because they omitted the far more significant fact, that his team had already read the content of lawmakers' private messages obtained through a different legal mechanism.
The Justice Department confirmed receipt of Jordan's referral and said it "will investigate all evidence of criminal conduct." That statement stops well short of a commitment to prosecute, but it does not dismiss the referral either. Under Blanche, a Trump appointee, the department faces a politically charged decision: pursue a case against the man who led two federal prosecutions of the president, or decline and face accusations of letting a potential perjurer walk.
No charges have been filed. No timeline for a DOJ decision has been announced. Several questions remain unanswered: which specific lawmakers' texts were read, what those messages contained, and whether any of the accessed communications played a role in Smith's prosecutorial decisions.
The dispute ultimately turns on whether Smith's testimony was a careful, accurate response to the narrow question he was asked, or a deliberate effort to hide the full picture from the committee overseeing his work. Jordan's referral argues the latter. Smith's lawyers and Raskin argue the former.
But the facts Jordan cites are not in dispute. Smith's team did access the text messages of 44 members of Congress. Those messages did include content, not just metadata. And Smith did tell the committee his team had not accessed such content. The only question is whether the distinction between a toll-record subpoena and a National Archives production order is a legitimate legal boundary, or a convenient loophole Smith used to avoid telling Congress the truth.
Jordan framed the stakes plainly in the referral: "This information calls into question the completeness and accuracy of statements that Mr. Smith made under oath to the Committee regarding his team's access to the content of Members' text messages."
When a special counsel spends years investigating whether a president obstructed justice, and then stands accused of obstructing the congressional inquiry into his own conduct, the irony writes itself, but the accountability still has to come from somewhere.
