Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Tuesday that the Department of Justice informed him that members of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigative team “secretly obtained” text messages belonging to lawmakers during investigations related to President Donald Trump.
According to Grassley, he was among 44 members of Congress whose communications with White House personnel were reviewed as part of investigations conducted during former President Joe Biden’s administration. Those inquiries focused on Trump’s alleged involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, as well as classified documents discovered at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence.
Smith led both investigations before ultimately dropping the cases after Trump won the 2024 presidential election.
Grassley, along with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released a joint report outlining the allegations. The senators said they sought records from the Justice Department after receiving information from whistleblowers regarding the handling of the investigations.
According to a letter from Assistant Attorney General Patrick Davis to Grassley, Smith’s investigative team “apparently bypassed” a document filtering team and instead “directly accessed these text messages.”
Grassley sharply criticized the conduct described in the letter, arguing that the investigation had gone beyond accepted procedures.
“Jack Smith’s criminal investigation of President Trump was a runaway train that had no brakes,” Grassley said in a statement.
He added that, based on the records provided to him and Johnson, investigators with the Biden-era Department of Justice and FBI “apparently ignored their own routine investigative protocols” when obtaining and reviewing work-related communications involving him and dozens of other lawmakers from both political parties.
According to Grassley, those members of Congress were outside the scope of the government’s investigation, making the review of their communications especially concerning.
The report released by Grassley and Johnson also included a list identifying the current and former Republican and Democratic lawmakers whose communications were allegedly reviewed during the investigation.
Johnson condemned the actions described in the report, calling them another example of what he characterized as the Biden administration’s misuse of the Justice Department.
“Jack Smith’s team acted with impunity as they disregarded their own protocols to obtain and access White House text messages, including messages to and from 44 Members of Congress,” Johnson said in a statement.
He added that, while he believes many Americans have grown accustomed to controversies surrounding Smith’s investigations, they should still be angered by what he described as recklessness and a blatant abuse of power.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who was identified as one of the lawmakers whose communications were allegedly reviewed, also criticized the reported actions. In a statement shared on social media, Scott said the revelations were “outrageous,” though he added they were not “remotely surprising.”
Scott argued that the reported collection of communications involving dozens of lawmakers was the latest example of what he described as a long-running pattern of Democrats weaponizing the federal government.
The allegations outlined by Grassley and Johnson stem from records they say were provided by the Justice Department following whistleblower disclosures, raising new questions about how investigators handled communications involving members of Congress during the investigations into President Trump.
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