WASHINGTON — More than 40 members of Congress had their text messages viewed by former special counsel Jack Smith’s team amid a probe into President Trump, a move that Republicans say “ran roughshod over the Constitution.”
The Department of Justice released records to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) on Tuesday revealing that the special counsel’s office had accessed communications between Trump White House personnel and 44 lawmakers from both parties.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the current ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, and former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), now the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, were just some of the new names whose messages were seen.
Smith’s office had established a so-called “Filter Team” to ensure they weren’t accessing privileged documents when reviewing messages that had been sought by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
The archives had sought all messages between the lawmakers and White House employees between October 2020 and Jan. 20, 2021.
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The filter team was supposed to evaluate evidence obtained as part of “Project Coconut,” which was looking into Trump’s efforts to reverse the 2020 election, and “Project Cranberry,” which concerned Trump’s alleged hoarding of national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
An Aug. 21, 2023, internal DOJ email included in the records Grassley received shows that Smith’s team discussed directly obtaining “54 excel files with text messages from White House phones,” which were placed in a shared drive.
Assistant Attorney General Patrick Davis told Grassley in the letter that Smith’s team “bypassed the Filter Team and directly accessed these text messages. The FBI then identified the people whose phone numbers sent or received the texts.”
“Jack Smith’s criminal investigation of President Trump was a runaway train that had no brakes,” Grassley said Tuesday.
“Based on the information that’s been produced to me and Senator [Ron] Johnson [R-Wis.], Biden DOJ and FBI investigators apparently ignored their own routine investigative protocols to obtain and review work-related messages from me and dozens of my Republican and Democrat colleagues who were outside the scope of the government’s investigation,” he noted.
“I hope my Democrat colleagues, several of whom had their own texts swept up, finally put partisanship aside and recognize the severity of these actions. Smith’s team ran roughshod over the Constitution even after repeated warnings.
“Jack Smith has answering to do, and I intend to have him before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the coming months to hold him accountable.”
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