House panel alleges Biden-Harris DOJ ‘ran roughshod’ over Constitution in Jack Smith's Trump probe

The House Judiciary Committee concluded in a report released Wednesday that the Biden-Harris administration wielded the Justice Department as a weapon and “ran roughshod” over constitutional protections and the separation of powers in order to spy on Republican members of Congress. 

The report, which the committee released on Wednesday, summarizes several years worth of investigation conducted by the committee into the tenure of Special Counsel Jack Smith, his investigations into President Donald Trump, and how he used those investigations to obtain privileged phone records from lawmakers.

“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 lawmakers concluded. 

“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 committee later added. 

In all, the committee found evidence that the FBI and Smith's team got phone toll records from 17 GOP members of Congress and text messages from as many as 44, some including information privileged to Congress, the report said. Among those targeted were former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan.

The report concluded the DOJ "disregarded the separation of powers to spy on their political opposition."

You can read the interim staff report below:

In obtaining the phone records, without notice and ability to challenge in a court of law, “the Biden-Harris Administration violated the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, a core provision that protects the official actions and communications of Members of Congress and immunizes them from prosecution for legislative acts,” the committee said in the report. 

The Speech or Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 6) serves as a check on executive power and is designed to prevent members of Congress from being “questioned in any other place,” ensuring they cannot be subjected to the scrutiny of the Justice Department or the judicial branch for their legislative acts.

The House Judiciary Committee has been releasing records since last fall that showed Smith–who was then targeting Trump for both allegedly mishandling classified documents and for his efforts to dispute the results of the 2020 election–had used those probes to scoop up the private communication records from dozens of lawmakers.

In 2025, the first FBI documents to be made public by Congress showed that records belonging to eight Republican senators and one GOP House member were swept up in Smith’s probe into the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan’s own phone records were also swept up. 

The committee later found that more than 160 Republicans were targeted by Smith’s probe, codenamed Arctic Frost. These included individuals like former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, Rep. Scott Perry, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, former Trump attorney John Eastman, and former Rep. Mark Meadows, who later served as Trump’s chief of staff.  

At the time, it was believed that Smith accessed toll records, which do not include the content of messages sent. However, new documents the committee published in July show that, in fact, Smith’s team did access content by apparently bypassing the established Filter Team, which is responsible for evaluating and segregating privileged information. 

This revelation has exposed Smith to possible perjury charges. During his prior testimony to Congress, the prosecutor told lawmakers emphatically, “no,” that his team did not request the content of messages, only the toll records.

Before releasing the report on Wednesday, the Judiciary Committee made public the testimonies of five former prosecutors on Smith’s team and a Justice Department agent during the Arctic Frost investigation. 

The agent, who worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General, said Smith’s prosecutors kept him in the dark that phone data he was gathering under grand jury subpoenas belonged to members of Congress and that he would have had reservations about doing so if he had been told, Just the News reported on Tuesday. 

The retired Special Agent, Brian Burnett, was quoted in the transcript as saying that during his decades working at the DOJ's watchdog, he never once was asked to collect congressional phone data and did not learn until after he retired in late 2024 that he had unwittingly done so as part of his work for Smith's team. 

Smith, who was appointed special counsel by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, conducted a sweeping investigation into then-former President Trump over alleged mishandling of classified materials and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Trump was later indicted in both cases, which were dropped after he won the 2024 presidential election and Smith resigned. 

"Arctic Frost" was one of four separate probes that targeted Trump and his allies stretching from summer 2016 to January 2025. The other probes were code-named Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, and Plasmic Echo, Just the News reported earlier this year. 

Trump and other Republicans repeatedly alleged that Smith and the FBI were themselves engaging in election influence by trying to bring charges, hold trials, and obtain convictions against Trump ahead of the 2024 election. The FBI raided Trump’s Florida home in Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 with the authorization of Garland. Then, Biden's attorney general picked Smith in November 2022 to lead the twin criminal investigations into Trump.