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A top House Republican wants the Justice Department to go after the man who twice tried to put Donald Trump in the dock.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to the department on Wednesday night, accusing former Special Counsel Jack Smith of misleading Congress.
His letter landed on the desk of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal defense attorney. Blanche stepped up to run the DOJ in April after Trump fired Pam Bondi in a tantrum over her failure to successfully prosecute his political enemies and has now been nominated to replace her.
A DOJ spokesperson told CNN it would “investigate all evidence of criminal conduct.” The network notes that members of Congress quite routinely fire off requests like this, and that the department is ordinarily free to can them if it sees fit.
Trump, 80, applauded Jordan’s letter in a 5:31 a.m. Truth Social post on Thursday. “Justice at last???” he wrote, attaching an article by pro-Trump outlet Just the News headlined, “House panel accuses Jack Smith of lying to Congress, urges DOJ to prosecute.”
Smith led two investigations into Trump under the Joe Biden administration. One probed Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, and the other his alleged mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Neither made it to trial. A judge threw out the documents case in July 2024, ruling Smith had never been lawfully appointed in the first place. Smith himself dropped both cases after Trump won that November, citing the department’s own rule against prosecuting a sitting president.
Trump, who was convicted of falsifying business records in a separate case, has long demanded jail time for Smith. Jordan now says in his letter that the former special counsel misled the House Judiciary Committee at a closed-door session in December, before Smith testified in public in January. The department handed the committee a stack of documents on July 14 showing Smith’s team had gotten hold of text messages involving members of Congress.
Jordan’s Wednesday letter doesn’t accuse Smith of saying anything untrue. It accuses him of giving “half truths” by not explaining where those texts came from—a move Republicans have been building toward for months.
Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson have released documents showing Smith’s office pulled records of phone calls for at least 11 senators and six House members, all of them Republican. Those logs showed who called who, and when, but did not contain the contents of those conversations.
Senate hearings on the underlying FBI probe, codenamed Arctic Frost, have nevertheless branded the investigation a “modern Watergate.” GOP senators have quietly pushed legislative changes that would allow them to sue for up to $500,000 each.
Jordan now claims that Smith’s team “obtained text messages of 44 Members of Congress—implicating both Republicans and Democrats in both chambers of Congress—that may have included privileged content.”
Smith’s office lawfully obtained those records from the National Archive, which maintains a record of messages and calls from all administrations, including Trump’s first. The House Judiciary Committee did not ask him about how he got hold of them during the earlier hearings.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the committee’s top Democrat, savaged Jordan for going after Smith over the texts. “The Republicans fault Mr. Smith for not reading the minds of congressional investigators and for not volunteering information they didn’t ask for,” he added. “This is absurd. Mr. Smith may be telegenic but he’s not telepathic.”
An X account for House Judiciary Democrats posted his statement with a rebuke of its own. “Republicans just sent a laughably weak and vindictive criminal referral of Jack Smith, the former Special Counsel who prosecuted Trump’s crimes, to the DOJ,” it wrote.
Xochitl Hinojosa, a Democratic strategist and former Justice Department spokesperson now at CNN, said Jordan was doing the president’s bidding. “Trump called for Jack Smith’s prosecution, so DOJ spent 20 months trying to find ANYTHING on Jack and failed,” she wrote. “Now we’re seeing a desperate attempt to try to prosecute this longtime career prosecutor for following the facts and the law.”
Trump has gone after other officials who investigated him, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Both were charged—and both cases collapsed.
Attorneys for Smith have hit back in a letter to Jordan and Blanche, calling his answers “unimpeachably truthful” and the referral “spurious.” The Daily Beast has contacted the White House, the DOJ, and Smith’s lawyers for comment on this story.
