Another Bombshell on How Jack Smith Targeted Trump Officials

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley says whistleblower disclosures show former special counsel Jack Smith’s team obtained internal communications involving nearly 50 journalists while gathering text messages from first-term Trump White House phones. The records came from a June 2, 2023, subpoena to the National Archives.

The Archives produced material tied to 87 phones on August 21, 2023. Investigators looking for official messages also pulled in traffic between reporters and government sources. Grassley’s office says the committee knows the journalists’ names and is holding them back for privacy.

The outlet list is not a boutique conservative blogroll. It includes Fox News, CNN, CBS News and 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, the Washington Times, and the Media Research Center.

“Jack Smith obtained internal communications from DOZENS of national media outlets communicating with government sources,” Senate Judiciary Republicans posted. Grassley put the question in one line: “What will the partisan media say about this disgraceful government overreach? This wasn’t a normal prosecution by any means.”

Earlier disclosures had already shown lawmakers’ messages in the same harvest. The journalist layer is what made Tuesday’s release land as a second blast. A subpoena aimed at White House phones became a net that also caught the people those officials were talking to in the press.

In May, Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson asked the Justice Department and FBI how, if at all, Smith’s team filtered 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.”

An August 21, 2023, email from assistant special counsel Thomas Windom directed staff to download documents tied to the White House text messages. That instruction is now part of the oversight file, along with the unanswered question of who sat on the filter team.

Smith has defended the broader investigation as a duty to gather facts about serious alleged crimes. He has not offered a detailed public accounting of how reporter communications were segregated, ignored, or used. Grassley has also said the same probe collected financial information from thousands of Trump donors, including checks with account and routing numbers.

Press freedom arguments usually run one direction in Washington: protect sources from government snooping. The political sting in this disclosure is that many of the same outlets that cheered Smith’s Trump cases now appear, by Grassley’s account, in the same records pile.

The committee’s next ask is procedural and ugly: who read the messages, what was withheld as privileged, and why a phone dump billed as an official-records request also mapped journalists to their government sources. That is the bombshell. The names of the reporters are still in the committee safe.