Anti-Trumper Jack Smith

DOJ records reveal Jack Smith's team accessed text messages of 44 lawmakers, bypassing its own safeguards

Former special counsel Jack Smith's investigative team accessed the text messages of 44 members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, after bypassing the office's own internal screening protocols designed to protect privileged and constitutionally protected communications, newly released Department of Justice records show.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin disclosed the findings after the DOJ delivered the records on Tuesday.

The messages, sent between October 2020 and January 20, 2021, were exchanged between the lawmakers and Trump White House personnel. Smith's team obtained them from the National Archives and Records Administration as part of its twin investigations into former President Donald Trump.

The disclosure raises hard questions about the scope and discipline of Smith's probe, and about whether his sworn testimony before Congress squares with the paper trail the DOJ has now produced...Filter Team protocols ignored.

Smith's office had established what it called a "Filter Team", a standard DOJ mechanism meant to screen out privileged or constitutionally sensitive material before investigators could review it. Internal DOJ documents released to Grassley spelled out the rules plainly:

"All communication to/from the Filter Team must go through the Coordinator. No materials shall be disclosed to the investigative team without approval of a filter team attorney."

Those rules were not followed. Assistant Attorney General Patrick Davis, in a letter accompanying the records release, told Grassley that Smith's team "bypassed the Filter Team and directly accessed these text messages." The FBI then identified the individuals whose phone numbers sent or received the texts.

Read all about it...