House Judiciary: Biden-Harris DOJ “Ran Roughshod” Over Constitution in Jack Smith Probes

The House Judiciary Committee released a 57-page interim staff report Wednesday concluding that the Biden-Harris Justice Department and Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office used law-enforcement power to collect communications of Republican members of Congress and “ran roughshod” over the Speech or Debate Clause and the separation of powers. The report is titled “How Jack Smith and the Biden-Harris Department of Justice Disregarded the Separation of Powers to Spy on their Political Opposition.”

“The Biden-Harris Administration, including Special Counsel Smith, ran roughshod over key constitutional protections to spy on Republican Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate,” the committee wrote. “Contemporaneous documents and testimony to the Committee reveal a deliberate assault by the Biden-Harris DOJ on fundamental separation of powers between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch.” The panel said investigators in the FBI’s Arctic Frost inquiry into the 2020 election, and later on Smith’s staff, obtained phone toll records for at least 17 Republican lawmakers and reviewed text messages involving as many as 44 members of Congress and executive-branch officials. Among those whose records were collected were former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan. The committee has separately said Arctic Frost touched more than 160 Republicans, including Steve Bannon, Rep. Scott Perry, Rudy Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, and Mark Meadows.

The report says the subpoenas were obtained ex parte, with gag orders that kept members from learning their records had been seized. Lawmakers had no chance to go to court and assert Speech or Debate protections. That clause, in Article I, Section 6, bars the executive from compelling disclosure of documents related to legislative acts. The committee said Arctic Frost investigators and Smith’s team “paid no attention” to what it called an absolute constitutional bar. It also said Smith’s prosecutors, at one point, skipped the department’s own filter-team procedures and reviewed private texts themselves. Senator Chuck Grassley, whose messages were among those collected, has said investigators downloaded and began reading the texts without waiting for the filter review. Four Democrats were among the 44 whose texts were swept up.

Fox News, citing the report, said the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section warned that the congressional subpoenas could be unconstitutional, then approved them anyway on the theory that gag orders created little “litigation risk” because members would never find out. Members remained unaware for more than two years, the committee said. On May 1, according to the report, DOJ issued a subpoena for Jordan’s incoming and outgoing calls from Jan. 1, 2020, to April 25, 2022. An agent from the department’s inspector general’s office served the subpoena on Jordan’s carrier. The committee said using that office, which is supposed to remain independent and report to Congress, broke internal rules.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith in November 2022 after Trump announced his 2024 campaign. Smith’s federal cases against Trump were dropped after the 2024 election. Smith resigned. The new report argues the record collection went beyond Trump to his political opposition in Congress. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., whose own phone records were pulled in Arctic Frost, introduced H.R. 9098, the Congressional Records Protection Act. The Judiciary Committee passed that bill in July. It would limit executive access to congressional records while leaving room for ordinary criminal investigations. The interim report is a staff product of the Republican majority. Democrats on the committee have not issued a matching finding.