Jim Jordan has formally asked the Justice Department to criminally prosecute Jack Smith for allegedly lying to Congress about text messages that Republicans never actually asked him about. The criminal referral, sent Wednesday to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, is either a serious legal filing or performance art, and the evidence strongly suggests it is the latter. Smith's lawyers are calling it 'spurious.' Jamie Raskin called it 'baseless and vindictive.' The DOJ said it will look into it, because of course it did.
What Jordan Is Actually Claiming
Here is the core of Jordan's argument, such as it is. During a December 2024 congressional deposition, Smith was asked whether his team sought a search warrant for the contents of any text messages from members of Congress. Smith said no. He was asked whether they had sought only toll records, meaning call logs with no content. Smith said correct.
Then, earlier this month, Senate Republicans obtained documents from the Justice Department showing that Smith's team had in fact reviewed text messages sent by 44 members of Congress. Those messages came not from a phone records subpoena, but from a completely separate subpoena to the National Archives and Records Administration, which produced records from White House staffers' phones covering October 2020 through January 21, 2021. The lawmakers' texts were swept up because they had been texting with White House officials during that window.
Jordan's theory is that Smith lied by not volunteering this separate subpoena when asked specifically about a different subpoena. That is the case. That is the whole case. Jordan wrote in his referral letter that Smith made 'willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact,' and asked Blanche to open a criminal investigation.
What Smith's Lawyers Actually Said
Attorneys Peter Koski and Lanny Breuer fired back in a letter to both Jordan and Blanche, and they were not gentle about it. According to NBC News, the lawyers wrote that Smith 'provided truthful, responsive answers and candidly discussed his work as Special Counsel.' Their argument is simple: the committee asked about one subpoena, Smith answered about that subpoena, and nobody asked him about the National Archives subpoena at all.
'The referral is made not because Mr. Smith made a false statement,' Koski and Breuer wrote, 'but because he did not proactively disclose information that was not responsive to a question asked.' They called the referral 'a chilling eagerness to weaponize the justice system by attacking a career, nonpartisan public servant who faithfully and fearlessly performed his duties by following the facts and the law.'
CBS News also reports that Smith's team had disclosed the text messages to Trump's lawyers at the time, and those lawyers did not raise any objection suggesting anything unlawful had occurred. That detail is not nothing.
The Democrats Who Cannot Believe This Is Happening
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, put out a statement Wednesday that deserves to be quoted at length because it is genuinely scathing. According to NBC News, Raskin argued that committee Republicans never asked Smith whether messages from lawmakers were found on White House officials' phones, never asked whether the presidential records Smith subpoenaed included those messages, and never asked whether his team had reviewed any member text messages at all.
'Jack Smith could not have lied because Republican Members never even asked the question their theory is based on,' Raskin said. CBS News quotes him going further: 'The Republicans fault Mr. Smith for not reading the minds of congressional investigators and for not volunteering information they didn't ask for. This is absurd. Mr. Smith may be telegenic but he is not telepathic.' That last line is going to age very well.
The Backstory on Those 44 Lawmakers
The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa, revealed on July 14 that the National Archives documents sent to Smith's team included texts from 44 members of Congress, the vast majority of them Republicans. The list included Grassley himself, along with Jordan, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Sens. John Cornyn and Rand Paul, and several others. Four Democrats are on the list too, including Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey.
Grassley called it 'disturbing and outrageous' and accused Smith's team of having 'spied' on members of Congress. The Senate Judiciary Committee also argued that because Smith's team did not wait for a filter team to screen out potentially privileged material before reviewing the messages, they violated the Constitution's Speech and Debate Clause, which protects lawmakers from executive branch intrusion into their legislative work.
Smith's team received those records from the National Archives in August 2023. So this has been sitting in Republican investigative pipelines for some time, and the timing of its sudden elevation to criminal referral territory, in the summer of 2026, with Trump firmly in power, is the kind of coincidence that is not a coincidence.
The DOJ's Response, Which Tells You Everything
A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed receipt of Jordan's referral letter and told both NBC News and CBS News that it 'will investigate all evidence of criminal conduct.' That is the standard line, and the DOJ is not required by law to do anything with a congressional criminal referral. But the fact that Todd Blanche's Justice Department is not laughing this into the recycling bin is itself a data point worth sitting with.
This is the same DOJ that has already dismissed the cases against Trump, dropped the special counsel investigations, and spent the better part of 2025 and 2026 systematically reversing the prosecutorial decisions made during the Biden years. The idea that Blanche will look at Jordan's referral and conclude it lacks merit requires a level of optimism the current moment does not justify. Fox News, per NBC News, was the first outlet to report the referral, which tells you roughly everything about who the intended audience is.
Who Is Jack Smith and Why Does This Keep Happening to Him
Smith was appointed special counsel by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in late 2022, shortly after Trump announced his 2024 presidential run. He oversaw two investigations: one into Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and one into his handling of classified documents taken to Mar-a-Lago after his first term. Both resulted in indictments, marking the first-ever federal prosecution of a former president.
Both cases collapsed. A judge dismissed the documents case on the grounds that Smith was invalidly appointed. The Supreme Court's broad immunity ruling gutted the election interference case, and Smith dropped it entirely after Trump won in November 2024. Before he did, Smith completed a final report arguing Trump would have been convicted at trial. Trump has called for Smith's prosecution multiple times. He has also gone after former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both of whom ended up facing criminal charges after drawing Trump's public ire. The pattern is not subtle.
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about what this is. Jim Jordan is asking the Justice Department to criminally charge a man for failing to volunteer an answer to a question that was never asked. Smith's own lawyers said as much in writing, Raskin said it on the record, and the underlying logic of the referral collapses the moment you read past the press release. This is not a serious legal action. It is a loyalty performance directed at an audience of one, delivered via official congressional letterhead to an attorney general who was himself Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer before taking the job.
The truly grim part is that the DOJ confirmed it will look into it, and in this administration, that is not a throwaway line. Trump has publicly wanted Smith prosecuted for years. He has watched two other critics get charged after he targeted them. Smith wrote a report saying Trump would have been convicted. These things are connected. The referral is the predicate. The investigation, if it comes, is the point.
Raskin is right that this will get laughed out of court if it ever gets there. But the damage does not require a conviction. It requires a news cycle, a subpoena, a deposition, legal fees, and the message it sends to every career federal prosecutor watching from the sidelines: this is what happens when you go after the wrong person. That message is landing loud and clear.
