Summary:
The Senate Judiciary Committee on 29 September 2026 used an oversight hearing of former special counsel Jack Smith to place on the public record the scale of the records collection behind his Trump prosecutions. Chairman Chuck Grassley put forward telephone toll records of Republican lawmakers taken under gag orders, text messages involving, by his account, 44 members of Congress, communications involving nearly 50 journalists, and 4,782 personal checks from small-dollar Trump donors carrying addresses, bank details and signatures. Grassley called the work a partisan weapon. Smith called the same tools ordinary conspiracy practice and said members of Congress were not targets.
Smith told the committee his investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump committed serious crimes, and that he would bring the same case against a president of either party. Republicans answered that the collection mapped a party rather than a closed set of events: financial subpoenas ran from 2019 through 2023, the target set numbered more than 400 Republican organisations and individuals, and no charges resulted from the fundraising inquiry.
The hearing concerned Arctic Frost, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) code name for the election investigation that became Smith’s 2023 prosecution of Trump over the 2020 result. Both of Smith’s indictments ended without trial. The Washington election case was dismissed in November 2024 under the Justice Department’s rule against charging a sitting president; the Florida documents case was thrown out in July 2024 by Judge Aileen Cannon on the ground that his appointment was unlawful. Volume I of his final report repeated his conviction claim; Volume II remains under Cannon’s order.
Detailed Report
1. Arctic Frost: The Investigation Behind the Hearing
Arctic Frost was the FBI investigation that became Jack Smith's election case against Donald Trump. The Bureau formally opened it on 13 April 2022 — months before Smith was appointed to lead it. Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and FBI Director Christopher Wray gave formal sign-off in early April, with Deputy Director Paul Abbate signing the opening request.
The Bureau’s own description, in documents later published by Grassley, was an inquiry into a “multifaceted conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential Election so that former president Trump could remain in office.”
The drafting had begun earlier in the FBI’s Washington Field Office. Assistant Special Agent in Charge Timothy Thibault circulated a draft opening communication on 14 February; an early working title, Hyperbolic Frost, was struck through by hand and replaced with Arctic Frost. A handwritten note on a draft subject list said “Add DJT.”
On 24 February Thibault emailed District of Columbia prosecutor John Crabb that the case team believed there was predication to include Trump as a subject. A grand jury in Washington had already begun hearing evidence, on 31 January.
The public-facing account at the time was narrower: a false-electors investigation aimed at slates pledged to Trump in states he had lost, and at lawyers including John Eastman, Rudolph Giuliani and Boris Epshteyn.
Jack Smith, a career federal prosecutor whose posts included the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, an acting United States attorneyship in Middle Tennessee and the chief prosecutor’s job at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, was appointed special counsel on 18 November 2022. Garland folded Arctic Frost, together with the classified-documents investigation at Mar-a-Lago, into his office. Smith obtained two federal indictments in 2023 and resigned on 10 January 2025, after submitting his final report.
Two descriptions of the file now sit on the public record. The Department and Smith describe Arctic Frost as a predicated criminal investigation of an effort to block the lawful transfer of power, opened through ordinary sensitive-case channels with the attorney general’s approval. Grassley, Senator Ron Johnson and House Judiciary Republicans describe it as a partisan expedition that named Trump in the first drafts and then widened to more than 400 Republican organisations and individuals, members of Congress, journalist traffic and thousands of small-dollar donors.
Grassley opened his oversight after whistleblowers contacted his office about Thibault in July 2022; Thibault later left the Bureau. The 29 September hearing was an argument between those descriptions, and the collection numbers were not in dispute.
2. Lawmakers' Phone Records Taken in Secret Under Court Gag Orders
Arctic Frost investigators, and later Smith’s office, obtained the telephone toll records of Republican members of Congress under court orders that barred the carriers from telling those members the records had been taken. Toll records are not recordings of calls; they are the numbers, dates, times and durations that show who contacted whom.
House Republican materials put the identified figure at least 17 members, including then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Chairman Jim Jordan’s own records were sought as early as April 2022, before Smith’s appointment, for a period running from 1 January 2020.
Senate productions from Verizon have named Senators Marsha Blackburn, Bill Hagerty, Rick Scott, Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Tommy Tuberville, Ron Johnson, Dan Sullivan and Cynthia Lummis, and Representative Mike Kelly, among others.
The secrecy came from nondisclosure orders. In the member-related tranche Grassley identified, a November 2025 letter from Grassley, Johnson and Jordan to the court stated that 19 of 45 carrier subpoenas carried such orders, signed by Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia — the chief judge now the subject of Republican impeachment resolutions that expressly cite those orders.
The Stored Communications Act allows a judge to bar notice where there is reason to believe that telling the subscriber would lead to flight, destruction of evidence, intimidation of witnesses or comparable jeopardy. Whether the judge knew the subscribers were legislators is contested. The Administrative Office of the United States Courts says standard practice leaves the judge without those names; the House Republican report says prosecutors did not disclose them and that Department policy has since changed to require it.
Smith told the Senate the records were common practice and were needed to map the “scope of the conspiracy.” He said members of Congress were not “targets.” Pressed on how agents identified which telephone numbers belonged to which senators, he answered, “I don’t have an answer to that.”
Republicans argue that applying the statute’s jeopardy test to a sitting Speaker or to senators, on the theory that Trump might obstruct, misused it. They say the Speech or Debate Clause, which protects legislative work from executive inquiry, and Department policy on congressional investigations were treated as obstacles to be worked around.
When AT&T raised Speech or Debate concerns over a request tied to Senator Ted Cruz, Smith’s office did not press that particular subpoena to production, according to AT&T’s counsel.
One member had more than metadata taken. On 9 August 2022, the day after the search of Mar-a-Lago, FBI and Department Inspector General agents used a location warrant, found Representative Scott Perry on holiday in New Jersey, seized his telephone, imaged it and returned it, and Smith’s team later obtained search warrants to Google and Apple for his personal email and messaging accounts. Perry is the only member whose physical device was taken, and Smith noted at the hearing that the warrant predated his appointment.
The gag orders drew a personal confrontation. Senator Darline Graham, sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, who died in July 2026, challenged Smith over the subpoena of her brother’s cell records and the order that had barred the carrier from telling him. Smith answered that Lindsey Graham was not a target and would likely have been a witness rather than a defendant, and that her brother had investigated Trump’s 2020 claims, found them false and said so in public. Her substantive point was the one Republicans pressed throughout: a flight-risk justification for gagging the carrier of a man who never possessed the records is incoherent.
McCarthy has said separately that he will have counsel pursue “all areas of redress so this does not happen to anyone else.”
3. Smith Obtained Texts of 44 Members of Congress and Nearly 50 Journalists
In June 2023 Smith’s office subpoenaed the National Archives and Records Administration for text messages from October 2020 through 20 January 2021 on phones associated with first-term White House personnel. The list included Trump, Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Ivanka Trump, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro, John Ratcliffe, Kash Patel, Rudolph Giuliani, Kellyanne Conway and Mike Pence. The Archives produced the material on 21 August 2023, and within about thirty minutes senior prosecutor Thomas Windom downloaded it.
Grassley and Johnson say that production included text content involving 44 members of Congress from both parties, including themselves. They say Smith’s team bypassed or under-used a filter group meant to screen Speech or Debate and other privileged material. A Department cover letter cited by the senators stated that the investigative team “apparently bypassed the Filter Team and directly accessed these text messages.”
That letter is the core of Jordan’s July 2026 referral of Smith to the Justice Department for alleged false statements. The referral concerns Smith’s December 2025 closed-door deposition, in which he described the congressional collection as toll records. Smith’s lawyers call the referral meritless and say he answered the questions he was asked.
On the morning of the hearing, Grassley released whistleblower material stating that the same Archives production, drawn from 87 White House phones, also swept up communications between nearly 50 journalists and Trump administration officials. Outlets he named on the record included Fox News, CNN, CBS News including 60 Minutes, NBC News, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Los Angeles Times, New York magazine, The Federalist, the Washington Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, NPR, the Mark Levin Show and the Media Research Center. Grassley asked, on the record: “What will the partisan media say about this disgraceful government overreach? This wasn’t a normal prosecution by any means.”
The traffic sat on official government phones, which is not the same fact as a warrant on a reporter’s personal device. The dispute is narrower and still serious: investigators obtained journalist–source messages, without notice to the journalists, inside a production the journalists never knew existed.
The Federalist was among the organisations Grassley named. Its chief executive and co-founder, Sean Davis, issued the day’s institutional statement: “We are still working to determine which of our reporters were targeted by Jack Smith and which journalistic communications he and his thugs seized. Spying on us was apparently part of Jack Smith’s plot to get revenge against us.” Davis said the organisation “will explore all legal options going forward.” Editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway’s personal telephone has not been named in the productions released so far; Davis’s statement cites her election coverage as the work that drew the interest.
Grassley and Johnson questioned Smith while saying their own texts were inside the same dump. Several other members on the known toll-record lists sat in judgment of him as well.
4. The Collection Reached 4,782 Small-Dollar Trump Donors
Smith’s investigators also collected thousands of personal checks from small-dollar Trump donors, a haul Grassley put on the hearing record as 4,782 instruments written between September 2019 and August 2023. The checks carried home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures.
Grassley told Smith the list included constituents of every member of the committee, Republican and Democrat. He said the Justice Department and the FBI will now permanently possess those addresses, account numbers and signatures. The material, he noted, did not appear in Smith’s public report. Smith offered no donor-by-donor justification on the public record.
The financial net was wider than the checks. Grassley has cited 197 subpoenas in the Arctic Frost set seeking records from hundreds of Republican groups and individuals. At the hearing Smith acknowledged to Cruz that the office had subpoenaed records of advertising buys on Fox News by conservative organisations including Turning Point USA, saying those subpoenas related to “false statements we were investigating.” No charges resulted from the fundraising inquiry. Cruz called the effort a fishing expedition.
The office moved against technology companies as well. Grassley produced preservation letters Smith sent to Apple days after his appointment, covering dozens of lawmakers, White House officials, advisers and Donald Trump Jr., with a request that Apple not disclose the existence of the request to the subscriber.
Internal records released earlier in 2026 add the team’s own words. One email stated that before telling Main Justice the team would “fire off subpoenas for so many members tolls.” Another said it was “unlikely that many of those members will cooperate.” A wish list named 14 members for whom the team wanted toll data.
Some financial subpoenas ran from 2019 through 2023, well beyond the January 2021 window. Republicans use that span to argue the project mapped a party rather than a closed week.
5. Smith Said the Collection Was Lawful and He Would Repeat It
Smith told the committee that the collection was ordinary work on a conspiracy case and that he would bring the same prosecution against a president of either party. Charging decisions, he said, were made without regard to Trump’s party or the 2024 campaign. “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” he told the senators. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president today, based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.” To the threats of prosecution he said he would not be silenced.
Those lines sit beside the endings of the two cases. Judge Tanya Chutkan dismissed the Washington election indictment on 25 November 2024 after Smith asked her to, citing the Department’s position that the Constitution forbids charging a sitting president. In the motion he wrote that the outcome was categorical and did not turn on the gravity of the crimes, the strength of the proof or the merits of the prosecution, “which the government stands fully behind.” The Supreme Court’s July 2024 immunity decision had already made a trial before the election impossible.
Volume I of the final report, delivered on 7 January 2025 and later released, put the same claim in writing: but for Trump’s return to office, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction. No jury heard that evidence.
The documents case had already stopped on a different ground. Cannon dismissed it in July 2024, holding that Smith’s appointment violated the Appointments Clause. Smith appealed; after the election he dropped Trump from that appeal, and the successor Department later dropped what remained against the co-defendants. Volume II of the report, which covers that file, is still restricted by her order, and Smith would not discuss it at the hearing.
On the toll records, Smith said they were approved after consultation with the Public Integrity Section and were materially relevant to criminal intent. The strongest witnesses in the election case, he said, were Republicans. He expressed pride in his staff and called their post-2024 firings an outrage. He had “absolutely no idea” whether the Biden White House had pressed Garland to approve the prosecution.
Republicans used the same block of questions to argue that the timing, not only the tools, showed purpose. Notes of Smith’s conversation with Public Integrity about a superseding January 6 indictment record advice on 17 August 2024 against handing down another charging instrument so close to the election. Smith reworked the indictment and obtained a new instrument about ten days later, so that Trump was again under indictment in Washington before voters cast ballots. Senator Eric Schmitt pressed him on whether Public Integrity had warned that a superseding indictment would violate the Department’s 60-day pre-election rule.
Grassley told Smith he “took partisanship to a new level,” and that “no matter what you say, there’s no legitimate basis for what you did.” Cruz said Smith had “brought the Department of Justice into disrepute.” Hawley said that if it were up to him he would charge Smith with perjury and seek disbarment. Democrats defended the investigation on the ground that the hearing had put investigators, rather than the events of January 6, on trial. Cruz asked Smith directly whether it was a crime to be a Republican. “Absolutely not,” Smith answered.
Conclusion
The hearing placed on one public record the scale of Arctic Frost’s collection: lawmakers under gag order, members’ texts and journalist-source traffic inside an executive-phone dump, and thousands of small-dollar donor checks in FBI hands. Smith’s position was that every step was lawful conspiracy work he would repeat. Republicans’ position was that the span and secrecy of the collection showed its purpose.