Jim Jordan sent the DOJ a formal referral accusing Jack Smith of lying to Congress about accessing lawmakers' text messages, and the department says it will investigate.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent acting Attorney General Todd Blanche a criminal referral this week accusing former special counsel Jack Smith of lying under oath to Congress. The Justice Department's response was brief and direct: it will investigate all evidence of criminal conduct.
The case Jordan is making rests on a single yes-or-no exchange. During a closed-door deposition before the House Judiciary Committee on December 17, 2025, Smith was asked whether he had ever subpoenaed the text messages of members of Congress. He said no. He told lawmakers his office's reach stopped at toll records, the phone company logs that show who called whom and when, and when texts were sent, but never what those texts said.
Records later surfaced from the Justice Department and Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley told a different story. Grassley's office disclosed that Smith's investigative team had, in fact, reviewed the contents of text messages sent by 44 members of Congress from both parties, though weighted toward Republicans. The route ran through the National Archives and Records Administration, which Smith's office subpoenaed in June 2023 for all text messages from White House-associated phones between October 2020 and January 20, 2021. Buried in those White House staffer exchanges were conversations with dozens of lawmakers, contents included, not just the metadata Smith described to the committee.
The distinction Smith drew for the committee, and the one his defenders are still drawing now, is that he never subpoenaed a member of Congress directly. He subpoenaed the Archives for White House staff records. Members of Congress simply turned up on the other end of those staffers' phones.
Jordan's referral argues that distinction is exactly the problem. A Filter Team had been set up inside the special counsel's office to screen out privileged or sensitive material before investigators saw it, according to reporting from the Washington Examiner and Just the News. Jordan contends that filter was bypassed, and that Smith's team read the substance of lawmaker communications while telling Congress, under oath, that it never touched anything beyond call logs. Whether the NARA route counts as a technicality or a dodge is now the whole fight, and it's the fight Jordan is asking Blanche's Justice Department to referee.
Democrats are not conceding an inch. Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin called the referral "baseless and vindictive," insisting Smith answered the specific question he was asked truthfully and cannot be faulted for not volunteering information nobody requested. "This referral, if ever brought before a judge, will get laughed out of court," Raskin said. It's a fair point on the narrowest reading of the transcript. It's a much weaker point once you consider that Smith, a career federal prosecutor who spent two years building cases against a former and future president, had every reason to know precisely how his own subpoenas worked and precisely what his team pulled from them.
A prosecutor now on the other side of the table
The irony here is not subtle. Smith led two federal prosecutions against Donald Trump, one over classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and one over the 2020 election, both of which collapsed after Trump's 2024 win when Smith moved to dismiss them under long-standing Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president. Now the same man faces the possibility of being on the receiving end of a federal investigation, run by the department he used to answer to, over statements he gave to the very committee that spent two years scrutinizing his conduct.
Blanche's Justice Department has not committed to charges, only to reviewing the evidence Jordan sent over. That is the honest state of play. A false statements case under 18 U.S.C. 1001 requires proving Smith knew his answer was false when he gave it, not just that the answer turned out to be incomplete or legally cute. Prosecutors will have to weigh whether the NARA-to-lawmaker pathway was a genuine surprise to Smith himself or something his team understood and chose not to disclose.
What happens next runs through Blanche's desk. If the department opens a formal investigation, it will need grand jury subpoenas, testimony from Smith's former deputies, and the underlying NARA production itself to establish what Smith knew and when. If it declines, Jordan's committee still has the referral on the public record, and Republicans will keep using it as evidence that the special counsel who chased Trump for years wasn't straight with the House that oversees him. Either way, the man who once decided whether to prosecute a president is now waiting to find out if the roles have reversed.
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