Grassley says he has records showing Jack Smith team reviewed 44 lawmakers’ text messages

Technology Grassley says he has records showing Jack Smith team reviewed 44 lawmakers’ text messages Comments: by Sarah Davis - 07/14/26 3:58 PM ET Comments: Link copied by Sarah Davis - 07/14/26 3:58 PM ET Comments: Link copied

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Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said on Tuesday that he received notice from the Justice Department (DOJ) that former special counsel Jack Smith’s team “secretly obtained” text messages from lawmakers as part of a probe into President Trump.

Grassley said he was one of the 44 lawmakers whose communications with White House personnel were reviewed during probes under former President Biden into Trump’s alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and classified documents found at the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

Smith oversaw both cases, which he later dropped following Trump’s 2024 election win.

In a joint report with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), the chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Grassley said the lawmakers requested these DOJ records after receiving whistleblower tips.

Assistant Attorney General Patrick Davis said in a letter to Grassley that Smith’s investigative team “apparently bypassed” a document filtering team and “directly accessed these text messages.”

“Jack Smith’s criminal investigation of President Trump was a runaway train that had no brakes,” Grassley said in a statement.

“Based on the information that’s been produced to me and Senator Johnson, Biden DOJ and FBI investigators apparently ignored their own routine investigative protocols to obtain and review work-related messages from me and dozens of my Republican and Democrat colleagues who were outside the scope of the government’s investigation,” the chair continued.

Grassley and Johnson published a list of all the lawmakers whose communications were allegedly reviewed in this investigation, which included current and former Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

Johnson called this report “another grotesque example of the Biden administration’s weaponization” of the DOJ in a statement.

“Jack Smith’s team acted with impunity as they disregarded their own protocols to obtain and access White House text messages, including messages to and from 44 Members of Congress,” he continued. “At this point, no one should be shocked by Jack Smith’s recklessness and blatant abuse of power, but they should be outraged.”

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), one of the lawmakers whose communications were allegedly reviewed in Smith’s investigation, called the news “outrageous” but not “remotely surprising” in a statement shared on social media.

“The fact that Jack Smith swept up dozens of lawmakers in his witch hunt is just the latest addition to a long train of abuses that we’ve seen from Democrats’ decades-long weaponization of government,” he said.

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