In a revelation shaking the foundations of American governance, recently released public documents from Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson confirm that Special Counsel Jack Smith's team not only spied on members of Congress but then brazenly lied about it under oath. This bombshell discovery is part of an ongoing congressional investigation that Senator Grassley has starkly declared has already uncovered criminal abuse of power by Democrats far "worse than Watergate."
During the Biden Department of Justice's politically motivated investigation of President Donald Trump, ostensibly under the guise of prosecuting Jan. 6, 2021, and complaints about 2020 election irregularities, Smith's team deliberately ignored required procedures. They illicitly accessed the private text messages of 44 members of Congress. Yet, in a shocking betrayal of public trust, Smith himself testified to Congress that he had only obtained "toll records," mere metadata like timestamps and recipients, not the actual content of the texts.
Among the lawmakers whose private communications were unconstitutionally obtained are Grassley and Johnson themselves, as confirmed by these newly public records. These disclosures are the latest from their critical "Arctic Frost investigation," named after the codename for Smith's deeply disturbing operation.
Previous revelations from this investigation have already shown Smith's team illegally obtaining Republican senators' communications data, effectively weaponizing his probe as a pretext to harass and potentially eradicate the entire conservative movement. He issued nearly 200 comprehensive subpoenas to over 400 conservative individuals and organizations, all under gag orders designed to prevent them from exposing this gross abuse of power.
The new documents provide undeniable evidence that the Biden administration has fundamentally violated the oaths of office, engaging in a dangerous abuse of the separation of powers. The Constitution's "speech and debate" clause exists precisely to protect members of Congress from criminal prosecution for speech related to their legislative duties. To have an executive agent spy on members of the legislature is not merely a constitutional violation; it is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes, designed to facilitate blackmail and life-destroying lawfare through the selective release of distorted, illegitimately obtained information.
While orchestrating authoritarian activities of the highest degree, the Biden administration and its compliant media echo chamber hypocritically insisted that their victims were the real authoritarians. Such pervasive projection is not only a mark of psychological delusion but a chilling sign of a totalitarian mindset taking root.
These new records explicitly indicate that Smith's team ignored longstanding DOJ and judicial rules demanding a "filter team." Such teams are critical, designed to sift through private records to protect "privileged" documents, including those shielded by attorney-client privilege or constitutionally barred from executive seizure or use in criminal prosecutions.
As part of Smith's sweeping prosecution, which has already cost American taxpayers more than $23 million, a filter team ostensibly previewed "several million documents." The newly released information details the massive scope of this special counsel's effort to impose ruinous legal and professional costs on anyone associated with President Trump. The filtering team alone included over 50 publicly paid DOJ staffers, who reviewed some 15 million documents over more than an entire year.
Disturbingly, the records also reveal that DOJ staff were instructed to code their work under "national security/domestic terrorism," another glaring example of Democrats not only criminalizing their opponents' constitutionally protected speech but doing so under the most severe and non-transparent domain available in federal law.
Smith's Jan. 6 investigation was covertly named "Project Coconut," and his Trump documents investigation, "Project Cranberry." These projects involved over 200 publicly paid staff across the FBI, DOJ, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and other agencies, with "Project Coconut" alone commanding a vast bureaucratic effort.
Yet, in a shocking display of contempt for the law, Smith's team apparently circumvented the filtering process to directly view the protected communications of lawmakers. This occurred in August 2023 when the special counsel received the results of its NARA subpoena for all text messages between October 2020 and January 20, 2021, from the phones of dozens of Republicans, including White House staff.
The subpoena shamelessly targeted the phones of President Trump, his son and daughter, Vice President Mike Pence, advisors Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro, then-CIA Director John Ratcliffe, then-FBI Director Kash Patel, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and 44 lawmakers.
On August 21, 2023, within merely half an hour of receiving these sensitive texts from NARA, "one of Smith's senior lawyers, Thomas Windom, downloaded the texts and, within one hour, other members of Smith's investigative team downloaded and began reviewing the texts. It appears the review was done without waiting for the Filter Team to evaluate and segregate privileged information," a press release from Grassley's office stated.
"[Filter] teams protect the integrity of a prosecution and preserve the constitutional rights of the parties involved," Assistant Attorney General Patrick Davis noted in a letter to Grassley, released today alongside other public records documenting Smith's spying. "Failure to adhere to sound filter team protocols can lead to the suppression of evidence or the disqualification of the prosecution team." Davis's letter underscored that Smith's team had been trained on these critical protocols, indicating they were fully aware their actions were unconstitutional. This is further corroborated by the documents themselves, which clearly outline the filter team instructions and training that Smith's team reportedly violated.
While four of the violated lawmakers were Democrats, including Senator Cory Booker and then-Representative Adam Smith, the overwhelming majority—40—were Republicans, including Senators Susan Collins and Mike Lee, and Representatives Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, Elise Stefanik, and Kevin McCarthy. Funny how that always seems to happen in one direction.
The Democrats' authoritarian use of federal spy agencies to eliminate political opponents has a long, troubling history, stretching back to the Spygate operations initiated by the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton's campaign. These operations, including the Democrats' partisan Jan. 6 Select Committee, have consistently involved the destruction of evidence. The Federalist previously revealed that the FBI maintained a secret records system designed to hide information from elected officials, even those with the highest clearances, using it to disappear evidence of agency malfeasance.
This pattern of egregious abuses by Smith's team is not an isolated incident but a continuation of a much larger campaign of weaponized injustice. More revelations about this special counsel operation are undoubtedly on the horizon.
The critical question remains: When will Congress finally take serious action beyond pontificating on television and holding toothless hearings? Federal agencies have already spied on Congress on other issues and repeatedly gotten away with it. This sheds light on why many Republican lawmakers appear too fearful to truly fight to preserve the republic from becoming a leftist police state, instead opting to protect these dangerous agencies. The most recent episode of this cowardly capitulation was the Senate GOP's shameful objections to a Democrat lawfare compensation fund.
Nothing changes if the perpetrators of these high crimes are not held accountable and imprisoned. The most obvious starting point in this case is prosecuting Jack Smith for lying to Congress, and immediately firing every federal employee who participated in this illicit operation. If they cannot be fired, they must be assigned to the legal equivalent of Siberia, far from any positions of power or influence over American citizens.
"Smith's team ran roughshod over the Constitution even after repeated warnings," Senator Grassley affirmed in his statement. "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." The American people deserve full transparency and ironclad accountability from a Department of Justice that has, for too long, acted like a partisan enforcement arm rather than an impartial arbiter of the law. Preserving the integrity of our constitutional republic demands nothing less than the swift and decisive dismantling of this weaponized two-tiered justice system.
