Former special counsel Jack Smith secretly subpoenaed nearly two years of FBI Director Kash Patel's phone records while Patel was a private citizen, newly released documents show. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley made the records public ahead of a Tuesday hearing examining the scope of Smith's investigation into President Donald Trump and his allies.
The subpoenas sought metadata on Patel's phone calls and text messages, not the content of those communications, but the logs of who he contacted, when, and how often. Smith's team also demanded Patel's mailing address, residential address, and email addresses. Two separate subpoenas covered overlapping windows: one from October 1, 2020, through February 22, 2023, and another from January 1, 2021, through November 23, 2022.
Court-approved nondisclosure orders kept the whole thing hidden. United States Magistrate Judge James Mazzone and U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama appointee, signed those orders, ensuring Patel would not learn his records had been swept up. Fox News reported the gag orders on Verizon lasted a full year, barring the carrier from notifying Patel that prosecutors had come knocking.
Patel's records are just one piece of a much larger picture. Grassley's office had already revealed that Smith sought toll records for more than a dozen Republican members of Congress. But the new documents expand the known scope of the probe, formally called Operation Arctic Frost, in striking ways.
A January 2023 internal list, now public, shows that Smith's prosecutors drew up names of lawmakers they hoped to subpoena. That list included Lee Zeldin, now the Environmental Protection Agency administrator; former Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz; Republican Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar; and Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whose records were later subpoenaed. Former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was also among those whose toll records Smith pursued.
When phone company executives testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in February, the numbers came into sharper focus. Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T received at least 84 subpoenas during the Arctic Frost probe, the Daily Caller reported, citing Grassley. And AT&T stood alone among the three carriers in pushing back, asking Smith's team to explain whether a request for Cruz's records could implicate constitutional protections for a sitting senator.
The New York Post reported that Smith's team went further than phone metadata with Patel, also subpoenaing credit card records, bank information, and related account details. The Post noted the subpoenas targeted more than 400 Republican individuals and groups in total, all accompanied by nondisclosure orders.
That figure, 400 targets, landed hard in the hearing room.
Sen. Ted Cruz did not mince words in describing the scale of what Grassley's documents revealed. As Fox News reported, Cruz told the committee:
"If Watergate taught us anything, it is that even a single abuse of power carried out by a handful of individuals can shake the foundations of our republic. But what we confront today, the Biden administration's Arctic Frost scheme is not a single act. It is a modern Watergate."
Cruz called it "a digital sweep into approximately 100,000 private communications, more than a dozen senators and thousands of individuals' lives," according to the New York Post's account. The comparison to Watergate is pointed, and not accidental. Where Nixon's men broke into one office, Smith's prosecutors filed paperwork to vacuum up phone and financial data from hundreds of Trump allies, all under seal.
Grassley, for his part, used his opening statement to defend the committee's methodical approach. Democrats had pushed the committee to haul Smith before the panel immediately. Grassley said patience paid off:
"If we'd followed the Democrats' premature and ill-advised strategy, we wouldn't have had a great deal of information we now have that shows Jack Smith misled Congress and the public, if not outright lied."
Grassley called the January 2023 wish list of congressional targets evidence that raises "additional questions about Smith's conduct, need for member data and candor to the court and the public."
Among the most revealing documents Grassley released: internal emails from Smith's prosecution team. One prosecutor wrote in an email that it "just occurred to me that before we tell Main [main justice] we are going to fire off subpoenas for so many members tolls I should make sure Jack's aware." The casual tone, "fire off subpoenas" for sitting members of Congress, speaks for itself.
A January 2023 attorney general briefing, also released Tuesday, showed Smith's team "went over" the Jan. 6 committee's final report "page by page" and "incorporated" it into the investigative plan. Smith had told Congress something different. In his special counsel report, he wrote that the Jan. 6 committee's work "comprised a small part of the Office's investigative record."
That gap between what Smith told the public and what internal documents show is exactly the kind of discrepancy Grassley flagged when he accused Smith of misleading Congress. It also tracks with Smith's own admissions about problems with key Jan. 6 testimony. During House Judiciary Committee testimony in January, Smith conceded that Cassidy Hutchinson, a star witness for the Jan. 6 committee, was not ruled out as a witness in his probe, even though he agreed elements of her testimony were "hearsay."
Rep. Jim Jordan summed up the reaction bluntly. As the Washington Examiner reported, Jordan said: "They got phone records on everybody. The one takeaway is it's always worse than we thought."
Kash Patel is no longer a private citizen whose records can be quietly scooped up under seal. He runs the FBI. And he has made clear he views the Arctic Frost probe as a case study in political weaponization. Breitbart reported that Patel said the FBI recently uncovered proof that lawmakers' phone records were seized for political purposes, adding bluntly: "That abuse of power ends now."
The broader cleanup at the FBI has already begun. The bureau fired roughly ten agents who worked on Trump's classified documents probe, and Patel has disclosed significant findings tied to prior FBI leadership since taking over the bureau. Those moves, combined with the Grassley releases, paint a picture of an investigation that was far broader, more secretive, and more politically targeted than its architects ever wanted the public to know.
Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson pressed the accountability angle in a statement, demanding that the phone companies cooperate with congressional investigators now examining Smith's conduct:
"I expect AT&T and Verizon to fully comply with my January 13, 2026 subpoenas for records that will provide Senator Grassley and me with even more evidence of the Biden administration's efforts to weaponize the federal justice system against President Trump and his allies."
Johnson also noted the stakes plainly: "The American people deserve to know the full extent of Jack Smith's partisan investigative tactics that unjustly targeted sitting Members of Congress as well as ordinary law-abiding citizens."
The Grassley releases fill in major gaps but leave others open. The documents do not specify which carrier held Patel's records or reveal the exact dates the subpoenas were issued. No case number or docket reference has surfaced publicly. And the full scope of the "new documents" beyond the subpoenas, the wish list, and the attorney general briefing remains unclear.
What is clear: Smith's team built an investigative apparatus that reached into the private communications of the man who now leads the FBI, multiple sitting senators, House members, and, if the 400-target figure holds, thousands of ordinary Americans. They did it under seal, with gag orders, and with the approval of federal judges who ensured none of the targets would find out. The prior investigations into discredited intelligence claims used against Trump and Smith's own authorized informant payments already raised hard questions about the special counsel's methods. These subpoenas raise harder ones.
When prosecutors can secretly harvest years of phone data from a future FBI director, a dozen-plus members of Congress, and hundreds of private citizens, all while telling the public the investigation was narrow and restrained, the word for that isn't oversight. It's the kind of thing oversight exists to stop.
