Jack Smith spent two years hunting President Trump.

The former special counsel swore his team played it by the book.

And now Senate Republicans unearthed one ugly secret about whose private messages Smith’s investigators grabbed.

Jack Smith’s subpoena swept up nearly 50 journalists

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith in November 2022 to run both the classified documents investigation and the January 6 investigation of President Donald Trump.

Garland sold the pick as a way to keep politics out of it. That pitch has aged badly.

Senate Judiciary Republicans announced in a post on X that Smith’s investigators obtained internal communications between scores of journalists and Trump administration officials during the federal election investigation.

“Jack Smith obtained internal communications from DOZENS of national media outlets communicating with government sources,” the Senate Judiciary Republicans account posted.

Fox News reported that the records caught nearly 50 journalists from national media outlets.

The list of outlets reads like a newsstand. Fox News, CNN, CBS News and its 60 Minutes, NBC News, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Reuters, the Associated Press, NPR, The Mark Levin Show, The Federalist, and the Washington Times all turned up in the files.

So Smith’s dragnet didn’t only catch conservative outlets. It caught the same legacy newsrooms that cheered him on.

How 87 White House phones ended up in Smith’s hands

The paper trail starts on June 2, 2023. Smith’s office sent the National Archives a subpoena that day seeking text messages from phones that officials used in the first Trump White House.

A spokesperson for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), citing whistleblower disclosures, told Fox News the subpoena covered material from 87 phones.

The Archives reportedly handed over the records on August 21, 2023.

And Smith’s team didn’t wait around. In an email dated that same day, assistant special counsel Thomas Windom reportedly directed members of the team to download documents tied to the White House text messages.

Earlier Congressional disclosures already showed investigators obtained records involving Members of Congress. Now reporters join the list.

“What will the partisan media say about this disgraceful government overreach? This wasn’t a normal prosecution by any means,” Grassley told Fox News.

The Media Research Center also landed in the probe. Its president, David Bozell, noted in 2025 that none of the broadcast networks covered disclosures alleging Smith spied on conservative groups and Senators.

But the committee won’t name the reporters. A Grassley spokesperson told Fox News the committee identified the journalists whose communications appear in the records and will withhold their names over privacy concerns.

That’s more courtesy than Smith’s office appears to have shown anyone.

Grassley and Johnson want to know who read what

Grassley and US Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) wrote to the Department of Justice and the FBI in May demanding answers about how Smith’s team screened potentially privileged material before investigators read it.

“We are writing to determine what procedures and protocols, if any, Smith and his team used to filter privileged or potentially privileged materials from being impermissibly accessed, reviewed and/or used,” the Senators wrote.

The Senators asked the DOJ to hand over its filtering procedures and to identify every official who reviewed the material for privilege before investigators got access.

Nobody has produced that answer publicly yet. And the silence says plenty.

The pattern behind Garland’s hand-picked prosecutor

A prosecutor running an ordinary case doesn’t need the text messages of 87 White House phones, a pile of lawmakers’ records, and the conversations of nearly 50 reporters.

But conservatives never saw Smith’s operation as an ordinary case. Garland’s man raced constitutionally contested charges into a Washington, DC courthouse, in a city where Republicans barely register, and pushed for a trial date that would have put the leading Republican candidate in front of a jury in the middle of the 2024 campaign.

Many on the Right read that calendar as the whole point. Put Trump in a DC courtroom, win a quick conviction from a friendly jury pool, and jail him before voters got a say.

Smith’s record backs up the suspicion. He ran the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section when it won a corruption conviction against a Republican Governor that the US Supreme Court later threw out unanimously.

Overreach isn’t new for him. It’s the résumé.

And the net kept widening well past Trump. Republican Senators, conservative nonprofits like the Media Research Center, and now anyone who texted a Trump White House official all ended up in the files.

There’s an awkward question in here for the press, too. Reporters spent years treating any criticism of Smith as an attack on the rule of law. Do they feel the same way now that their own source conversations sit in a prosecutor’s download folder?

Maybe they’ll shrug it off. The broadcast networks ignored the earlier disclosures about Senators and conservative groups, as Bozell pointed out.

But the First Amendment doesn’t come with a party registration. A government that can quietly collect a reporter’s messages with a source can chill every whistleblower in Washington, DC, and it won’t matter which administration holds the keys next time.

That’s the same argument conservatives make against warrantless spying and FISA. Sweep up everything first, sort out the privilege questions later, and trust the government to behave itself. It rarely does.

What nobody knows yet is how many people on Smith’s team read those journalists’ messages, or what they did with them. Grassley and Johnson asked. The DOJ owes them an answer.

And if the filtering procedures turn out to be thin or missing, this story gets a lot bigger than one subpoena to the National Archives.

Smith built his cases as the 2024 election closed in. The records he collected along the way are still telling on him.

Sources:
Breitbart News, “Jack Smith Obtained Internal Communications Between Nearly 50 Journalists, Trump Officials,” September 29, 2026
Fox News report on journalists’ communications in Jack Smith’s subpoenaed White House phone records
Senate Judiciary Republicans, post on X, and the May letter from Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson to the Department of Justice and FBI