House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has sent a criminal referral for former special counsel Jack Smith to the Justice Department, alleging Smith lied under oath about whether his team accessed the private text messages of dozens of members of Congress.
Jordan's referral, addressed to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, accuses Smith of making "intentionally false statements designed to obstruct the Committee's oversight" during a December 17, 2025, deposition before the House Judiciary Committee. The move marks a sharp escalation in the Republican-led investigation into how Smith conducted his federal prosecutions of President Donald Trump, and whether the former prosecutor misled Congress about the scope of his surveillance of elected officials.
The Justice Department confirmed receipt of the referral and said it "will investigate all evidence of criminal conduct." No charges have been filed.
The referral centers on what Smith told congressional investigators under oath about his team's handling of telephone records. During his December 2025 deposition, Smith testified that his office sought only "toll records", historical routing data showing incoming and outgoing call numbers, call times, and durations. He explicitly told investigators his team did not examine the contents of lawmakers' text messages, answering "no" when asked directly.
But documents released by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley upended that account. Those records, which Fox News first reported, showed Smith's team read the text messages of 44 members of Congress from both parties and White House staff during its investigation. The texts were sent between October 2020 and January 20, 2021, the period surrounding the 2020 presidential election and the transition of power.
Jordan's letter to Blanche framed the gap between Smith's testimony and the documentary record in blunt terms.
"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."
The chairman argued that Smith's partial disclosures amounted to an affirmative falsehood. As Newsmax reported, Jordan's letter stated: "A statement containing some truthful information becomes affirmatively false when it represents that the partial information is complete." The referral specifically cited 18 U.S.C. § 1001, the federal false statements statute, as the potential criminal violation.
Grassley's investigation added another layer. His office found that Smith's team appeared to violate investigative protocols by accessing text messages that had not first been screened by a "filter team." A filter team is a separate group of Justice Department attorneys whose job is to review seized material before investigators see it, screening out privileged communications, attorney-client exchanges, legislative deliberations, and other constitutionally protected records, so that prosecutors cannot use them improperly.
Smith's investigators obtained the text messages through records held by the National Archives, not through telecom providers, the New York Post reported. That distinction matters: Smith's testimony focused on "toll records" from phone companies, which by definition do not include message content. The National Archives records, however, did contain the actual texts, and Smith's team accessed them directly.
The lawmakers whose messages were reportedly swept up span both parties and include prominent names. Among them: the late Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana, and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. Trump administration officials whose texts were also accessed include former Vice President Mike Pence, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Ivanka Trump.
Of the 44 lawmakers affected, 40 were Republicans and four were Democrats, according to records reviewed by the Washington Examiner. Sen. Ted Cruz described the scope of the surveillance in stark terms: "When you have the Biden Department of Justice subpoenaing 20% of the Republicans in the Senate, it is an egregious abuse of process."
The text message controversy sits inside a broader pattern. Smith's investigation, internally code-named "Arctic Frost", involved 197 subpoenas issued to 34 individuals and 163 businesses, with records requested on more than 430 individuals and organizations. All of those subpoenas reportedly targeted Republicans.
Smith brought two separate federal criminal cases against Trump in 2023, one related to alleged interference with the 2020 election, the other involving Trump's handling of classified documents. Neither case went to trial. Both were wound down after Trump's 2024 election victory, consistent with longstanding Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
The collapse of those prosecutions left Republicans free to turn the investigative lens back on Smith himself. Jordan's referral is the most concrete step yet in that effort. The question of whether a special counsel weaponized the legal system around the 2020 election has become a central concern for GOP lawmakers on both sides of the Capitol.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called Jordan's referral baseless and accused Republicans of distorting the record.
"This referral deliberately distorts and misstates the facts, including what questions the Republicans actually asked at Mr. Smith's interview. 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. Mr. Smith may be telegenic but he is not telepathic."
Raskin's argument hinges on the specifics of the questions posed during the deposition, whether investigators asked Smith about toll records from telecom providers (which do not contain text content) versus records from the National Archives (which did). Jordan contends that Smith's answers were misleading regardless, because they created a false impression that his team never accessed lawmakers' texts in any form.
Smith's legal team, represented by the law firm Covington, issued its own statement through Breitbart, calling the referral an attack on a "career, nonpartisan public servant who faithfully and fearlessly performed his duties by following the facts and the law." Raskin went further, predicting the referral "will get laughed out of court" if it ever reaches a judge.
Smith has denied any wrongdoing. But the denial sits uneasily next to the documentary record now in congressional hands, records showing his team did, in fact, read the private text messages of sitting lawmakers, and did so without the filter-team safeguard that exists precisely to prevent that kind of access.
The Justice Department's confirmation that it will investigate the referral is notable on its own. Criminal referrals from Congress are common; investigations that follow them are not automatic. The department's statement, that it "will investigate all evidence of criminal conduct", suggests the matter will receive more than a cursory review.
Still, significant questions remain unanswered. The full content of the records Grassley released has not been made public. The precise mechanism by which Smith's team accessed the National Archives texts, and whether anyone on the team flagged the filter-team bypass at the time, is unclear. And the complete list of all 44 affected lawmakers has not been disclosed.
Federal prosecutors have shown a willingness to pursue false-statement charges in other high-profile contexts. The same statute Jordan cited, 18 U.S.C. § 1001, has been used against defendants ranging from former national security officials to individuals charged with federal election-related crimes. Whether the Justice Department applies that same standard to a former special counsel who investigated the sitting president will test the principle that no one is above the law, a phrase Smith's own office invoked repeatedly during its prosecutions.
Jordan framed the stakes in his letter with characteristic directness.
"All individuals have an obligation to comply with a duly authorized congressional inquiry. Mr. Smith, a former public servant, is no different."
The referral also lands at a moment when federal prosecutors across the country are pursuing cases against political figures and their associates, raising the broader question of whether the Justice Department's investigative apparatus can be trusted to police its own. Jordan's letter, backed by Just The News reporting on the referral's specifics, asks Blanche to determine whether Smith "knowingly made false statements to obstruct the Committee's oversight."
Smith spent years investigating a president. Now Congress wants the Justice Department to investigate him, for the same kind of conduct prosecutors charge ordinary citizens with every day. If the standard Smith applied to others doesn't apply to Smith himself, then it was never really a standard at all.
