For years, Washington demanded that Americans trust the people investigating President Trump without ever asking who was watching the investigators.
That arrangement cracked in public Wednesday.
During his Senate confirmation hearing, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked a question that should never have been necessary: Did former Special Counsel Jack Smith read the communications of sitting United States senators?
Blanche’s answer was direct.
“We will check, Senator, yes.”
Watch the exchange here:
🚨BREAKING NEWS🚨
Acting AG Todd Blanche confirms Jack Smith is UNDER INVESTIGATION for spying on members of Congress.
Yesterday, I reached out to the DOJ for comment regarding the latest details on the 44 members of Congress that were allegedly spied on but did not hear back. pic.twitter.com/PjCvypEH48
— Breanna Morello (@BreannaMorello) July 15, 2026
One important distinction: the caption says Blanche confirmed that Smith is already under investigation.
The clip itself does not establish that.
What it does establish is an on-record commitment from the man nominated to lead the Justice Department that DOJ will find out what Smith accessed, how he obtained it and whether the rules were followed.
That is a major development all by itself.
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s official hearing page confirms that Blanche appeared Wednesday as the nominee to become attorney general.
Senator John Kennedy used his questioning time to press Blanche on the safeguards surrounding congressional and attorney communications. Blanche said checks are supposed to make it extraordinarily difficult for a prosecutor to collect and review protected material.
Kennedy’s point was that those checks appear to have failed when Smith’s team accessed the messages released this week. He asked whether Smith read his emails, how the team got Senator Grassley’s communications and whether the material was shared with anyone else.
Blanche said he could not speak for Smith and did not yet know what had been shared. He then agreed, on the record, that DOJ would check.
The hearing video therefore gives Americans a promise of review, not a finished investigative finding. The records below explain why that review cannot be cosmetic.
And the documentary evidence waiting for Blanche is explosive.
The Senate Judiciary Committee released records Tuesday showing that Smith’s investigative team reviewed the contents of text messages involving 44 current and former members of Congress.
The list crossed party lines. It included 40 Republicans and four Democrats whose communications with first-term White House officials were found inside the message production.
Among them were Senators Chuck Grassley, Ron Johnson, Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Mike Lee and Cory Booker, along with House members Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise, Thomas Massie, Adam Smith, Josh Gottheimer and Karen Bass.
The production went far beyond telephone numbers and timestamps. Investigators had the contents of messages exchanged between lawmakers and officials using devices or accounts from the first Trump White House.
The messages were acquired from the National Archives, not seized directly from lawmakers’ personal phones or obtained from their wireless carriers. They appeared inside a broader production of White House communications requested by the special counsel.
The committee says the released records do not publicly display every underlying message, and many names, numbers and portions remain redacted. The list of 44 affected lawmakers comes from DOJ’s own review of the material.
That makes the disclosure both narrower and more serious than the word “spying” suggests. Smith’s team did not secretly tap 44 congressional phones.
It gained access to the actual content of congressional communications swept into a White House records subpoena, then apparently reached that content before the required privilege review was complete.
The committee chairman disclosed the finding publicly Tuesday:
I received records frm DOJ confirming Jack Smith's investigative team reviewed the contents of text msgs sent by 44 MEMBERS OF CONGRESS Im 1 of the 44
Im alerting my colleagues who were impacted and will release the records w Sen Johnson so American ppl can see the evidence— Chuck Grassley (@ChuckGrassley) July 14, 2026
The way Smith’s team obtained the messages is crucial.
In June 2023, the special counsel subpoenaed the National Archives for text messages from October 2020 through January 20, 2021, associated with a long list of White House personnel.
That list included President Trump, Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Ivanka Trump, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro, John Ratcliffe, Kash Patel, Rudy Giuliani, Kellyanne Conway and Vice President Mike Pence.
Messages sent to or from members of Congress were swept into that White House production.
The issue is not that federal investigators can never obtain government records. The issue is what happened to the safeguards after those records arrived.
A Justice Department summary of the records says DOJ had established a separate Filter Team to screen material gathered in Smith’s January 6 investigation, known internally as Project Coconut, and his classified-documents investigation, known as Project Cranberry.
The Filter Team existed to keep potentially privileged material away from the prosecutors and FBI agents running the investigations. Investigators were supposed to receive records only after a filter attorney reviewed and approved them.
That protection was especially important when the records could include attorney-client communications or messages tied to lawmakers’ official duties under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. The Clause protects legitimate legislative acts from executive-branch prosecution.
According to DOJ’s own summary, Smith’s investigative team “apparently bypassed the Filter Team and directly accessed these text messages.” That is the current Justice Department’s description of what the newly produced evidence shows.
Blanche described the safeguards in similar terms during Wednesday’s hearing: barriers designed to make access to privileged communications extraordinarily difficult. If Smith’s prosecutors could open the files before that process finished, the safeguard existed on paper while the protected material sat exposed in practice.
Apparently bypassed.
Directly accessed.
Those are the Justice Department’s words, not a political commentator’s.
The underlying Arctic Frost records lay out a minute-by-minute timeline that is difficult to square with a careful privilege review conducted before investigators opened the files.
At 12:19 p.m. on August 21, 2023, National Archives counsel told senior Smith prosecutor Thomas Windom that the agency had identified 54 spreadsheets containing the requested White House messages.
By 12:45 p.m., Windom told colleagues he had already downloaded the production. The released correspondence does not show a filter attorney approving those congressional communications during that 26-minute window.
By 1:02 p.m., Windom was circulating two specific messages from the files. Other investigators were also being told to download the production and place it into shared review systems.
From notification to active review, the process took less than an hour.
An earlier internal email makes the timeline harder to dismiss. In June 2023, DOJ personnel warned that software permissions could allow investigators to reach some records before filter review was complete.
Fixing those permissions was labeled a top-priority item.
Two months later, the National Archives production arrived and members of the investigative team moved almost immediately. The records released so far do not show that a filter attorney cleared the congressional communications before those downloads and reviews began.
The filter wall was supposed to stand between the raw production and the investigative team. The newly released record indicates the team went through the door first and dealt with the wall later.
That disclosure immediately revived scrutiny of Smith’s sworn House testimony from December 2025:
Jack Smith explicitly denied under oath during his House Judiciary deposition last December that he reviewed text messages from members of Congress:
Q: "Did the records that you requested from the Member of Congress include the content of text messages?"
Smith: "No." https://t.co/XLb9lyFXSP pic.twitter.com/jBDSAYYQzD
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 14, 2026
Here again, precision matters.
The House Judiciary deposition transcript shows that Smith’s “no” came during questioning about toll records obtained from members of Congress.
Toll records are normally metadata: numbers, times and durations, not message contents. They can reveal who contacted whom and when without exposing what either person actually said.
The newly released records concern a separate route. They involve message contents obtained from the National Archives because the communications were stored on White House devices or accounts, not lawmakers’ carrier records.
Earlier in the deposition, Smith was also asked whether his office sought a warrant for lawmakers’ text-message contents. He said he did not recall doing so and agreed that investigators had obtained “just toll records.” Later, when asked whether those toll records included content, he answered no.
The short clip does not settle whether Smith gave false testimony because the questions were framed around records requested from the lawmakers themselves. The National Archives production used a different route.
It still leaves a glaring question that Smith must answer.
When Congress asked whether his investigation had reviewed lawmakers’ message contents, did he give the committee the whole truth about every way his team obtained them?
The Washington Examiner reviewed the same DOJ production and documented the two separate acquisition paths now at the center of the dispute.
The previously disclosed subpoenas sought lawmakers’ telephone metadata. The new records deal with message contents stored on phones and accounts used by first-term White House officials.
That distinction explains how Smith could truthfully describe one set as toll records while his broader team still possessed congressional message contents from another source.
The report also notes that Windom circulated two specific messages from the National Archives files at 1:02 p.m., only 43 minutes after Archives counsel announced the spreadsheets. Investigators then moved the entire production into shared storage and their document-review platform.
Not every message has been made public, and the available records leave names and portions redacted. Smith’s attorney did not respond to the outlet’s request for comment.
Smith has maintained that his investigations followed Justice Department policy and were not driven by politics.
That defense now collides with DOJ’s written finding that his team apparently bypassed its own filter process.
Following policy and bypassing the team created to enforce it cannot both be the complete story.
Grassley says Smith will be called before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the coming months.
That testimony should not become another made-for-TV hearing where five-minute speeches replace answers.
Congress needs the audit trail.
Who authorized immediate access to the National Archives production?
Which investigators viewed the lawmakers’ messages before filter approval?
What privileged material was exposed?
How were those communications used?
And what did Jack Smith know when he testified under oath?
The constitutional stakes are bigger than the names on this particular list.
Congress is not above the law. Neither are federal prosecutors.
When the executive branch searches through communications touching the legislative branch, the rules protecting that boundary are not optional paperwork. They are part of the machinery that prevents political power from becoming prosecutorial power.
Blanche has now promised that DOJ will check.
The records are waiting.
So are 44 members of Congress.
And this time, “trust us” is not an answer.
This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.
What are your thoughts?
