House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has sent a criminal referral for former special counsel Jack Smith to the Justice Department, alleging Smith lied under oath about whether his team read the private text messages of dozens of members of Congress.
Jordan's referral letter, addressed to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, accuses Smith of making "intentionally false statements designed to obstruct the Committee's oversight" during a closed-door deposition on December 17, 2025. The allegation centers on a straightforward discrepancy: Smith told congressional investigators his team sought only telephone toll records, call logs showing numbers dialed, call times, and durations, and denied examining the contents of lawmakers' text messages. Newly obtained DOJ records, Fox News reported, tell a different story.
Documents released by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley show Smith's team read text messages belonging to 44 members of Congress, from both parties, along with White House staff, during its investigation into President Donald Trump. Jordan argues Smith's failure to disclose that access amounted to a knowingly false and misleading statement under federal law.
During his December 2025 deposition before the House Judiciary Committee, Smith described the records his team obtained in narrow terms. He told investigators his office sought "toll records", routing information collected after calls had taken place, and emphasized that "toll records do not include the content of calls." When asked directly whether he examined the contents of lawmakers' text messages, Smith answered "no."
But DOJ records provided to Congress on July 14 painted a sharply different picture. Those records showed Smith's investigators had reviewed text messages from 44 members of Congress, 40 Republicans and four Democrats, obtained not through telecom subpoenas but through the National Archives. The messages were sent between October 2020 and January 20, 2021, and involved communications between lawmakers and White House employees, Newsmax reported.
Jordan's referral letter framed the gap between Smith's testimony and the newly surfaced records as more than a technicality. In the letter, Jordan wrote that Smith's answers "gave the impression that neither Mr. Smith nor his team had access to the content of Members' privileged text messages." He added bluntly: "We now know this to be false."
The referral alleges Smith violated 18 U.S.C. § 1001, the federal false-statements statute, which makes it a crime to knowingly make materially false statements to Congress or federal investigators. Jordan argued that a statement "containing some truthful information becomes affirmatively false when it represents that the partial information is complete."
Grassley's release added a second layer to the controversy. The documents indicated Smith's team appeared to violate investigative protocols by accessing text messages that had not been reviewed by a "filter team", a safeguard designed to prevent investigators from reading privileged communications, such as those between attorneys and clients or between lawmakers engaged in legislative deliberations. Smith's investigators bypassed that screen, according to the records, and directly accessed the messages.
The scope of Smith's investigative reach extended well beyond rank-and-file members. Among those whose text messages were accessed: Jordan himself, Grassley, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana, and Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. Communications belonging to former Vice President Mike Pence, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Ivanka Trump were also swept up.
The Washington Examiner reported that Smith issued 197 subpoenas to 34 individuals and 163 businesses during his probe, with records and communications touching more than 430 individuals and organizations, reportedly all aimed at Republicans. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas called the breadth of the effort an "egregious abuse of process."
Cruz did not mince words:
"When you have the Biden Department of Justice subpoenaing 20% of the Republicans in the Senate, it is a fishing expedition, and we need to have a full and thorough investigation and accountability for every executive branch official who signed off on weaponizing the government."
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, dismissed Jordan's referral as a distortion. Raskin argued Republicans were faulting Smith for failing to volunteer information they never specifically asked about.
"This referral deliberately distorts and misstates the facts, including what questions the Republicans actually asked at Mr. Smith's interview. The Republicans fault Mr. Smith for not reading the minds of congressional investigators and for not volunteering information they didn't ask for. This is absurd. Mr. Smith may be telegenic but he is not telepathic."
Smith's legal team pushed back harder. Lawyers from the firm Covington, representing Smith, called the referral "spurious" and argued the toll-record subpoenas at issue sought metadata, not content. They contended Smith was never directly asked about text message content obtained through other channels, such as the National Archives. In a statement reported by the Associated Press, Smith's lawyers described the referral as "a chilling eagerness to weaponize the justice system by attacking a career, nonpartisan public servant who faithfully and fearlessly performed his duties by following the facts and the law."
That defense rests on a fine distinction. Smith's answers about toll records may have been technically accurate regarding telecom subpoenas. Jordan's case is that Smith knew his team had separately obtained the actual text message content through the National Archives, and chose not to say so. The question is whether that omission crossed the line from careful lawyering into a false statement.
The Justice Department did not brush the referral aside. In a statement to Fox News Digital, a DOJ spokesperson confirmed receipt and said the department "will investigate all evidence of criminal conduct." No charges have been filed.
Jordan's letter framed the stakes in institutional terms, not personal ones. "All individuals have an obligation to comply with a duly authorized congressional inquiry," he wrote. "Mr. Smith, a former public servant, is no different."
Breitbart noted the referral represents the latest effort by congressional Republicans to pursue legal and investigative action against Smith following the collapse of both federal criminal cases against Trump. Smith has denied any wrongdoing.
Jordan's referral letter closed with a direct request: he called on the Justice Department to examine whether Smith's conduct warrants criminal charges. The New York Post reported Jordan cited "strong evidence" that Smith "knowingly made false statements" during his December 17, 2025, deposition.
Several open questions remain. Which specific questions were posed to Smith during the deposition, and how precisely were they worded? Did Smith's legal team advise him on how to characterize the Archives-obtained texts? And who inside the Biden-era DOJ authorized the bypass of the filter team that was supposed to protect privileged congressional communications from investigator access?
For years, Americans were told the special counsel's office operated by the book. Now Congress has the receipts, and the man who once pursued a president may find himself on the other side of a federal investigation.
