Politics

Jack Smith Violated Constitution To Spy On Republicans In Lawless ‘Arctic Frost’ Investigation, Committee Alleges

former Special Counsel Jack Smith (Screen Capture/CSPAN)

The Biden administration wielded the country’s most powerful law enforcement tools to spy on Republicans with little concern for whether they violated key tenets of the Constitution, according to new evidence unearthed by congressional investigators.

Biden-era Department of Justice Special Prosecutor Jack Smith was so persuaded of the righteousness of his investigation into President Donald Trump that he flagrantly flouted the nation’s founding document, alleges a new report by the House Judiciary Committee.

Smith made repeated intrusions into the communications of members of Congress, the same branch of government tasked with providing oversight of the DOJ and the FBI’s secret work and reining in its excesses.

The report released Wednesday states that Smith violated the Speech and Debate clause, which provides legal protection for the Legislative Branch against legal retaliation by the Executive Branch and maintains a balance of powers between the two coequal branches.

But the FBI and the DOJ paid little mind to this fundamental American principle, or the delicate care required when investigating public officials, when they accessed the phone records of 17 Republican members of Congress in an investigation into the 2020 election codenamed “Arctic Frost.” Gag orders prevented the targets from learning they had been spied on for years.

“Members of Congress’ communications are protected under the Speech or Debate Clause. Jack Smith knows this. But he ignored the Constitution to spy on Republicans,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, said in a social media post.

“Whether through arrogance or maliciousness, these partisan prosecutors were willing to violate the Constitution and break prosecutorial norms to achieve their narrow goals,” the report states. “The Speech or Debate Clause protects … American citizens too. It guarantees that the people’s representatives in Congress may advocate effectively on their constituents’ behalf without the threat of interference or intimidation by the Executive Branch.”

Smith’s team received text messages between members of Congress and officials in the first Trump administration from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) that may have included privileged content, the report alleges. The DOJ also obtained 27-months of phone records belonging to Jordan, the top Republican in the House overseeing the department.

In addition, the Biden-era FBI physically surveilled Republican Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry for a week before physically seizing his cellphone, according to the report.

The new report also alleges that top prosecutors responded flippantly when pressed in transcribed interviews and depositions about the legality of accessing the phone records.

For instance, Assistant Special Counsel Timothy Duree claimed that the specific type of records obtained — “toll records” describing telephone numbers and the dates and durations of calls — are not protected under the Speech or Debate Clause, the report notes. He also alternately claimed that obtaining nearly two years of Jordan’s phone records was necessary to map his “networks,” or were a “mistake.”

And Senior Assistant Special Counsel Molly Gaston quibbled with whether a congressional vote to certify a presidential election was an “obvious” official legislative act, and therefore protected under the Constitution.

Smith’s team breezed through or outright ignored the usual legal safeguards.

The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section had only “perfunctory” discussions with Smith’s team about the constitutionality of their probe, sometimes cautioning there could be constitutional issues before approving the subpoenas anyway, emails obtained by the committee show. The integrity office said the gag orders that concealed the seizure of Republicans’ phone records limited the “litigation risk,” other emails included in the report show.

The prosecutors also appear to have violated the DOJ’s standard operating procedures.

DOJ protocol mandates the use of “filter teams” to protect the constitutional rights of the individuals involved in an investigation, but the committee alleges that Smith bypassed these legal protections.

In June 2023, Smith’s office received a massive trove from NARA: 54 spreadsheets of text messages from inside Trump’s orbit obtained from the White House custodian.

Within an hour senior attorney Thomas Windom was eavesdropping on the conversations of Trump and his top advisors in his first administration: former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. former Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, first daughter Ivanka Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and many others. It appears the review was done without waiting for the review of privileged information.