House Republicans released six transcripts from Jack Smith's team that reveal investigators secretly subpoenaed phone records of more than a dozen Republican members of Congress, using gag orders to keep the lawmakers from ever finding out.
The House Judiciary Committee published the transcripts on Tuesday, pulling back the curtain on how the former special counsel's office operated during its investigation of President Donald Trump. Five prosecutors from Smith's team, J.P. Cooney, Molly Gaston, Ray Hulser, Tad Duree, and Thomas Windom, sat for interviews, along with Brian Burnett, an agent from the Department of Justice's Office of Inspector General. Their testimony describes an investigation that bypassed lawmakers directly, went to their phone carriers instead, and obtained court orders barring those carriers from telling their customers the government was collecting their call data.
Committee Republicans allege the investigators improperly subpoenaed those records and that the process denied elected officials any chance to challenge the demands in court. The transcripts offer the most detailed public account yet of how Smith's team handled the constitutional minefield of surveilling sitting members of Congress.
The mechanics were straightforward. Rather than approach lawmakers or their attorneys, Smith's team served subpoenas on phone providers, Verizon, in the case of House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan's records. Nondisclosure orders, or NDOs, accompanied those subpoenas. The NDOs barred the carriers from notifying the account holders that the government had demanded their records.
Prosecutor Tad Duree explained the rationale in his testimony. An NDO, he said, "will prohibit a person who holds that phone number from litigating issues surrounding the subpoena." In plain terms, the lawmakers whose records were seized had no opportunity to object, because they were never told.
Duree also defended the decision to use a warrant rather than a voluntary request to seize Rep. Scott Perry's phone:
"If you seek to obtain something voluntarily, people can just choose not to give it to you. That's one obvious thing. But there are myriad opportunities for evidence to be altered, tampered with, deleted, added to. And in this search warrant, same as any others, it was important to me and our team to obtain evidence in a way that it was unadulterated."
Perry was the only lawmaker to have his phone physically seized. Prosecutor Thomas Windom testified that investigators obtained a "location-warrant", essentially pinging Perry's phone to find him, and discovered he was on vacation in New Jersey. Windom described a deliberate effort to keep the seizure quiet:
"In this particular case... the whole team wanted to image the phone and get it back to Congressman Perry as quickly as possible. We were trying real hard to do this in a way that was minimally disruptive, it was as respectful as it could be, and it didn't put Congressman Perry in an awkward spot where we're seizing a phone right out on Independence [Avenue] in front of the Rayburn Building or it's some big hubbub."
Perry had been described as a go-between connecting Trump to Jeffrey Clark, a senior DOJ official who was willing to explore challenges to the 2020 election results. The investigation examined whether Trump attempted to block the transfer of presidential power after that election.
One of the more politically charged revelations in the transcripts involves Jordan himself, now the chairman of the very committee that released the documents. Page seven of Duree's transcript states that the DOJ's Public Integrity Section, the unit that oversees investigations involving public officials, knew investigators were seeking Jordan's phone records when it approved the step in April 2022.
Brian Burnett, the OIG agent who physically served the subpoena to Verizon for Jordan's records, told the committee he had no idea the phone number belonged to a sitting congressman. The records arrived as raw data.
"Just phone numbers."
Burnett said he only learned the connection after he retired in 2024, when news coverage and a publicly surfaced subpoena made the link clear. "It was not until I had been retired and this was on the news and there was conversation about Mr. Jordan's toll records being subpoenaed and then there was a subpoena that came up on the internet," he testified.
The scope extended well beyond Jordan. The New York Post reported that over a dozen GOP lawmakers had their cellphone metadata seized, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Sen. Lindsey Graham, and Sen. Josh Hawley. Smith himself admitted in a separate deposition that judges who signed off on the nondisclosure orders were not told the subpoenas targeted members of Congress.
Jordan's committee has since weighed a criminal referral against Smith over allegations that his testimony to Congress was misleading, a matter that remains unresolved.
Burnett's testimony went beyond the Jordan subpoena. A veteran of more than 30 years in law enforcement, including 15 years in the DOJ inspector general's office and nine years as a senior narcotics detective with the Chesterfield County Sheriff's Office near Richmond, Virginia, Burnett described an investigative structure that broke sharply from standard practice.
He testified that the probe operated in a way that was "unique, as far as the over 30 years of law enforcement experience I have." Asked whether he had encountered another case in which prosecutors dictated investigative steps normally handled by agents, Burnett was blunt:
"Not in my entire 30 years of law enforcement."
That testimony cuts to one of the committee's central complaints: that Smith's office ran a prosecutor-driven investigation in which the usual division of labor between agents and attorneys was abandoned. In a typical federal case, agents develop leads and prosecutors evaluate them for legal sufficiency. Burnett's account suggests the process was inverted.
The broader picture of accountability for former senior law enforcement officials has become a recurring theme in Washington, with multiple high-profile figures now facing congressional scrutiny or criminal exposure for conduct during and after the Trump years.
The transcripts show prosecutors pushing back on the suggestion that they ran roughshod over lawmakers' constitutional protections. Duree testified that the team was "hypervigilant and extremely aware of the contours of the Speech or Debate Clause," the constitutional provision that shields lawmakers from executive-branch interference in their legislative duties.
"We knew that Speech or Debate was something that we had to navigate. We treated it seriously."
Duree acknowledged, however, that the legal terrain was not fully mapped. He described the investigation as running into "the corners of the law that aren't fully built out", a candid admission that the team was operating in areas where case law offered limited guidance.
Prosecutor Ray Hulser offered a similar defense, testifying that Smith personally insisted on caution before subpoenaing members' records. "He wanted to be very careful if we were going to be getting subpoenas for members," Hulser said, adding that written justifications were prepared for each request and that the list of targets was kept narrow.
But the committee's findings tell a different story. A comprehensive report from the House Judiciary Committee concluded that Smith's office and the DOJ "ran roughshod over key constitutional protections to spy on Republican Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate." That same report alleges FBI and Smith's team obtained phone toll records from 17 GOP members of Congress and text messages from as many as 44, with more than 160 Republicans targeted overall by the probe, which was codenamed "Arctic Frost."
The committee report also alleges Smith's team accessed actual message content despite his sworn testimony that only toll records, metadata showing who called whom and when, not the substance of conversations, were requested. If true, that discrepancy could carry serious legal consequences for Smith.
The six transcripts released Tuesday are not the only window into Smith's conduct. The Washington Examiner reported that the House Judiciary Committee also released the full transcript and video of a separate closed-door deposition with Smith himself, conducted on December 17 and lasting more than eight hours. That deposition revealed previously undisclosed details about the covert subpoenas and, according to the Examiner, gave Republicans additional material for their accusations of Justice Department weaponization under former Attorney General Merrick Garland.
In that deposition, Smith maintained that his decisions were made without regard to Trump's political activities or candidacy. Breitbart reported that Smith told the committee: "If Donald Trump had chosen to call a number of Democratic senators [to delay the election certification proceedings], we would have gotten toll records for Democratic senators." He also testified publicly before the committee on January 22.
That claim, that the investigation was politically neutral, sits uneasily beside the fact that every known target of the phone-records sweep was a Republican. Smith's office never sought Democratic lawmakers' records because, he argued, the evidence led only to GOP members. Whether that explanation satisfies skeptics depends largely on whether one trusts the premise that drove the investigation in the first place.
The question of DOJ leadership and institutional direction remains live. The confirmation of a new attorney general has reshaped the department's leadership, and the incoming team inherits the fallout from Smith's tenure.
Rep. Chip Roy of Texas was among those whose phone records were obtained without his knowledge. A nondisclosure order prevented his carrier from alerting him. Roy's case illustrates the broader pattern: lawmakers learned their records had been swept up not through any official notification, but through news reports and congressional investigations conducted after the fact.
President Trump, the central subject of Smith's investigation, has continued to challenge the legal apparatus that targeted him and his allies. His ongoing legal battles reflect a broader confrontation between the executive branch and the judicial and investigative institutions that pursued him.
The transcripts answer some questions and raise others. The full list of lawmakers whose records were seized has not been publicly confirmed beyond a handful of names. No court has issued a definitive ruling on whether the subpoenas violated the Speech or Debate Clause. The status of Jordan's criminal referral against Smith remains unclear. And the contents of Perry's phone after it was imaged have not been disclosed.
What the transcripts do establish is that federal prosecutors secretly collected the private communications data of sitting members of Congress, used gag orders to prevent those members from learning about it or challenging it, and did so while acknowledging that the constitutional law governing such actions was, in their own words, "not fully built out."
When the government secretly surveils the people's elected representatives and then blocks those representatives from even knowing it happened, the question is no longer about one investigation or one president. It is about whether any branch of government can be trusted to police itself.