The House Judiciary Committee released an interim report Wednesday alleging the Biden-Harris Justice Department secretly obtained phone records and text messages from dozens of Republican members of Congress during Special Counsel Jack Smith's twin probes of Donald Trump, a move the committee says violated core constitutional protections.
The report, the product of a multi-year congressional investigation into Smith's tenure, concludes that the FBI and Smith's team used grand jury subpoenas to sweep up toll records from at least 17 GOP lawmakers and text messages from as many as 44, all without notifying the affected members or giving them a chance to challenge the collection in court. Among those whose records were gathered: former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan himself.
The committee's central charge is that Smith's operation trampled the Speech or Debate Clause, the provision in Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution that shields members of Congress from executive-branch interference in their official duties. That clause exists for a reason older than the republic itself, to prevent a president or his prosecutors from using law-enforcement power to rifle through a legislator's work product and private communications.
Smith was appointed special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022, three months after the FBI raided Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida. He led two criminal investigations: one into Trump's handling of classified documents, the other into efforts to dispute the 2020 election results. Both cases ended in indictments, and both indictments were dropped after Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Smith resigned.
But the committee's investigation has steadily revealed that the probe's reach extended far beyond Trump. The Judiciary Committee's report describes a sprawling effort, codenamed "Arctic Frost", that touched more than 160 Republicans, including former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, Rep. Scott Perry, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, former Trump attorney John Eastman, and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
The first FBI documents Congress made public in 2025 showed that records belonging to eight Republican senators and one GOP House member had been swept up in Smith's probe into the events surrounding January 6, 2021. The full scale only came into focus later.
Starting last fall, the committee began releasing records showing Smith had scooped up private communication records from dozens of lawmakers. Then, in documents the committee published in July, a more troubling allegation emerged: Smith's team appeared to have bypassed the DOJ's own Filter Team, the internal unit responsible for evaluating and segregating privileged information, to access the actual content of lawmakers' messages, not just the metadata showing who called whom and when.
That distinction matters. Jordan's committee had previously reported on DOJ records showing Smith's team accessed text messages from 44 lawmakers while sidestepping the safeguards designed to protect privileged material. The new interim report ties those findings together into a single constitutional indictment of the Biden-era DOJ's conduct.
One of the more striking details in the committee's investigation involves Brian Burnett, a retired special agent who worked in the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General. Burnett gathered phone data under grand jury subpoenas as part of his work for Smith's team. He did not learn until after he retired in late 2024 that the data he had been collecting belonged to members of Congress.
The committee made Burnett's testimony public alongside the transcripts of five former prosecutors who served on Smith's team. That Burnett was kept unaware of whose records he was handling raises a pointed question about how Smith's operation was structured, and whether the compartmentalization was designed to avoid the kind of internal pushback that might have flagged constitutional concerns before the damage was done.
Jordan has not stopped at the report. He has separately referred Jack Smith for criminal prosecution, alleging Smith gave false testimony to Congress about whether his team requested the content of lawmakers' messages. Smith told Congress emphatically "no" when asked whether his team sought message content, only toll records. The committee's findings, drawn from contemporaneous documents and witness testimony, directly contradict that denial.
The report states Smith is now "exposed to possible perjury charges." No formal charge has been filed as of the report's release.
The committee's findings land in the context of a broader pattern. Just the News has reported that Trump and his allies were targeted by four consecutive FBI counterintelligence probes stretching from summer 2016 to January 2025, Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, Plasmic Echo, and Arctic Frost. Each probe fed into the next, and each expanded the universe of people caught in the investigative net.
That timeline spans two presidential administrations and covers the full arc from the Russia-collusion investigation through the classified-documents case and the January 6 probe. The committee's report frames the collection of lawmakers' records as the latest, and perhaps most constitutionally dangerous, chapter in that sequence.
The report's language is blunt. It describes "a deliberate assault by the Biden-Harris DOJ on fundamental separation of powers between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch." It accuses the administration of having "disregarded the separation of powers to spy on their political opposition."
Jordan's oversight work on this front now enters a different phase. He recently stepped away from the Judiciary Committee gavel, fueling speculation about his next move. But the machinery he set in motion, subpoenas, transcripts, document releases, and now this interim report, continues to produce material that the Biden-era DOJ has not publicly rebutted.
Neither Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, nor any representative of the Biden-Harris administration has responded publicly to the committee's report or its conclusions. That silence is itself notable. The report names specific constitutional violations, identifies specific individuals whose records were taken, and accuses a former special counsel of lying to Congress. A denial, a rebuttal, or even a procedural objection would be the ordinary response. None has appeared.
The committee's interim report arrives at a moment when congressional oversight itself is under scrutiny from both sides. Democrats have signaled their own appetite for sweeping investigations should they retake the House. The difference, as the Judiciary Committee's findings illustrate, is between investigating political opponents through public hearings and secretly collecting their private communications through the machinery of federal law enforcement, without notice, without a court challenge, and without regard for the constitutional protections that exist precisely to prevent that kind of executive overreach.
The Speech or Debate Clause was not written to protect lawmakers from embarrassment. It was written to prevent the executive branch from using its prosecutorial power to intimidate, surveil, or silence the legislature. If the committee's findings hold, the Biden-Harris DOJ did not just bend that principle. It ignored it entirely, and did so in secret, while the special counsel told Congress the opposite under oath.
When a government spies on the people's elected representatives and then lies about it to their faces, the question is no longer about one investigation or one prosecutor. It is about whether the constitutional guardrails that separate a free government from an authoritarian one still mean anything at all.
