Former special counsel Jack Smith's investigative team accessed the text messages of 44 members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, after bypassing the office's own internal screening protocols designed to protect privileged and constitutionally protected communications, newly released Department of Justice records show.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin disclosed the findings after the DOJ delivered the records on Tuesday. The messages, sent between October 2020 and January 20, 2021, were exchanged between the lawmakers and Trump White House personnel. Smith's team obtained them from the National Archives and Records Administration as part of its twin investigations into former President Donald Trump.
The disclosure raises hard questions about the scope and discipline of Smith's probe, and about whether his sworn testimony before Congress squares with the paper trail the DOJ has now produced.
Smith's office had established what it called a "Filter Team", a standard DOJ mechanism meant to screen out privileged or constitutionally sensitive material before investigators could review it. Internal DOJ documents released to Grassley spelled out the rules plainly:
"All communication to/from the Filter Team must go through the Coordinator. No materials shall be disclosed to the investigative team without approval of a filter team attorney."
Those rules were not followed. Assistant Attorney General Patrick Davis, in a letter accompanying the records release, told Grassley that Smith's team "bypassed the Filter Team and directly accessed these text messages." The FBI then identified the individuals whose phone numbers sent or received the texts.
An internal DOJ email dated August 21, 2023, included in the released records, shows Smith's team discussed directly obtaining "54 excel files with text messages from White House phones." Those files were placed in a shared drive, accessible without Filter Team approval.
The 44 lawmakers came from both parties. Among the named members whose messages were accessed: Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Cory Booker of New Jersey. House members caught in the sweep included House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, and former Rep. Karen Bass of California, now the mayor of Los Angeles.
Lee Zeldin, the former New York congressman who now heads the Environmental Protection Agency, also appeared on the list.
On the White House side, the messages involved communications with then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, then-Vice President Mike Pence, Dan Scavino, Ivanka Trump, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro, Kellyanne Conway, Rudy Giuliani, and two officials who now hold top intelligence posts: CIA Director John Ratcliffe and FBI Director Kash Patel.
The breadth of the collection is striking. The messages were gathered under two internal investigation names, "Project Coconut," focused on Trump's efforts to challenge the 2020 election results, and "Project Cranberry," concerning the alleged retention of national security documents at Mar-a-Lago.
The records create a pointed tension with Smith's own sworn statements. During a December 2025 deposition before the House Judiciary Committee, Smith was asked whether his team looked at "the content of text messages" during his probes into Trump. His answer, captured in the published transcript: "No."
The DOJ records now confirm his team directly accessed the message files and the FBI identified the people behind the phone numbers. Whether "accessed" means investigators read the content or only handled metadata remains an open question, but the gap between Smith's flat denial and the documented chain of custody is difficult to ignore.
Neither Smith nor his attorneys have publicly addressed the discrepancy, based on available reporting.
Grassley did not hold back. In a statement released alongside the records, the Iowa senator framed the episode as a systemic failure of restraint within the Biden-era DOJ.
"Jack Smith's criminal investigation of President Trump was a runaway train that had no brakes."
He continued, as the New York Post reported:
"Based on the information that's been produced to me and Senator Johnson, Biden DOJ and FBI investigators apparently ignored their own routine investigative protocols to obtain and review work-related messages from me and dozens of my Republican and Democrat colleagues who were outside the scope of the government's investigation."
Grassley also made a direct appeal across the aisle:
"I hope my Democrat colleagues, several of whom had their own texts swept up, finally put partisanship aside and recognize the severity of these actions. Smith's team ran roughshod over the Constitution even after repeated warnings."
He pledged accountability. "Jack Smith has answering to do, and I intend to have him before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the coming months to hold him accountable," Grassley said.
Sen. Johnson offered his own assessment:
"This is yet another grotesque example of the Biden administration's weaponization of the Justice Department. At this point, no one should be shocked by Jack Smith's recklessness and blatant abuse of power, but they should be outraged."
This is not the first sign that Smith's office cast an unusually wide net. Grassley's office had previously disclosed that Smith's team subpoenaed 430 Republican individuals or groups for various records. More than a dozen Republicans also had their phone logs subpoenaed.
The new records add a different dimension. The 44 lawmakers whose messages were accessed were not, by all available indications, subjects of the investigation. They were third parties, elected officials communicating with White House staff during the final months of an administration. And the safeguard meant to prevent exactly this kind of overreach, the Filter Team, was sidestepped by the investigators themselves.
The DOJ's own internal protocol document, released by Grassley and Johnson, makes the breach clear on its face. The rules required that no materials reach the investigative team without a filter attorney's sign-off. The August 2023 email shows the team discussed placing the Excel files in a shared drive, a direct contradiction of the protocol's chain-of-custody requirements.
Several questions hang over the disclosure. The identities of 35 of the 44 affected lawmakers have not been made public. It remains unclear whether the investigators reviewed the substance of the messages or confined themselves to metadata such as phone numbers and timestamps. The "repeated warnings" Grassley referenced, warnings that Smith's team allegedly ignored, have not been detailed in the released records.
And the central factual question has not been resolved: Did Smith's team read the content of those 54 Excel files, or did they merely handle them? Smith said "No" under oath. The DOJ's own assistant attorney general says the team "bypassed the Filter Team and directly accessed" the files. Those two statements are difficult to reconcile without further testimony.
Grassley has signaled that testimony is coming. Whether Smith cooperates voluntarily or must be compelled will be the next chapter.
The bipartisan nature of the sweep makes the episode harder to dismiss as partisan overreach targeting only one side. Democratic senators and House members had their messages collected alongside Republicans. The Filter Team existed precisely because the Constitution draws lines around legislative communications, lines that investigators are not free to cross on their own authority.
When a special counsel's office sets up its own safeguard, writes it into formal protocol, and then ignores it to access the private messages of dozens of sitting lawmakers, the word for that is not aggressive prosecution. It is institutional failure.
The question now is whether anyone will be held to account for it, or whether bypassing the Constitution's guardrails carries no consequence at all.
