House Judiciary Committee Republicans published six transcripts from Jack Smith's special counsel investigation, exposing how prosecutors secretly obtained phone records from more than a dozen GOP lawmakers, and blocked them from finding out.

The transcripts, released Tuesday, contain sworn testimony from five members of Smith's prosecutorial team and one federal agent, detailing how the former special counsel's office subpoenaed Republican members of Congress during its probe of President Donald Trump's actions after the 2020 election. The interviews reveal investigators used nondisclosure orders, effectively gag orders, to prevent phone providers from telling the targeted lawmakers that the government had seized their records.

The release lands alongside a criminal referral that House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan filed with the Department of Justice against Smith himself. Together, the transcripts and referral mark the most detailed public accounting yet of how the investigation, codenamed "Arctic Frost," reached into the private communications of sitting members of Congress, and how little oversight accompanied that reach.

Prosecutors tracked Perry to a New Jersey vacation before seizing his phone

Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania was the only lawmaker who had his phone physically seized during the investigation. Prosecutors described Perry as a go-between connecting Trump and Jeffrey Clark, the highest-ranking DOJ official willing to explore challenges to the 2020 election results. Investigators said Perry's "proximity to Trump and his hand in trying to find a legal strategy to keep Trump in office" made his communications a target.

Before the seizure, Fox News reported that prosecutor Thomas Windom testified the team obtained a "location-warrant" that pinged Perry's phone and found him vacationing in New Jersey. Windom told investigators the team wanted to avoid a scene outside the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill:

"In this particular case... the whole team wanted to image the phone and get it back to Congressman Perry as quickly as possible. We were trying real hard to do this in a way that was minimally disruptive, it was as respectful as it could be, and it didn't put Congressman Perry in an awkward spot where we're seizing a phone right out on Independence [Avenue] in front of the Rayburn Building or it's some big hubbub."

Prosecutor Tad Duree defended the decision to use a warrant rather than a voluntary request. He testified that asking Perry to hand over the phone voluntarily would have given him the chance to refuse, or worse, to alter or delete evidence:

"If you seek to obtain something voluntarily, people can just choose not to give it to you. That's one obvious thing. But there are myriad opportunities for evidence to be altered, tampered with, deleted, added to. And in this search warrant, same as any others, it was important to me and our team to obtain evidence in a way that it was unadulterated."

The Biden-era DOJ's willingness to physically seize a sitting congressman's phone, after tracking his location through a warrant, raises questions about proportionality that the transcripts do not fully resolve. Perry was never charged.

That pattern of aggressive federal action against political targets echoes cases like the Biden DOJ's prosecution of Paul Vaughn, where federal authorities used force and legal pressure that critics later argued far exceeded what the circumstances warranted.

Gag orders kept lawmakers in the dark while prosecutors pulled their records

Beyond Perry's phone seizure, the transcripts reveal a broader effort to obtain Republican lawmakers' communications without their knowledge. Investigators subpoenaed phone records from providers like Verizon and paired each demand with a nondisclosure order barring the company from notifying the customer.

Duree was blunt about the effect of those orders. A nondisclosure order, he testified, "will prohibit a person who holds that phone number from litigating issues surrounding the subpoena." In plain terms: the targeted lawmakers could not challenge the government's demand because they did not know it existed.

Rep. Chip Roy of Texas was among those affected. Prosecutors subpoenaed his phone records from his provider, not from Roy directly. A nondisclosure order prevented the provider from alerting him. When asked about the specifics of obtaining Roy's records, Duree said he did not particularly remember the details of the correspondence.

A House Judiciary Committee report concluded that Smith's team accessed phone toll records from 17 GOP members of Congress and text messages from as many as 44, with more than 160 Republicans targeted overall by the Arctic Frost probe. Targets included former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Jordan, Steve Bannon, and Rudy Giuliani. The committee's report described the effort as a "deliberate assault by the Biden-Harris DOJ on fundamental separation of powers between the Executive Branch and the Legislative Branch."

Smith maintained that the subpoenas were lawful. In his own earlier deposition before the committee, the New York Post reported that Smith admitted the judges who signed off on the nondisclosure orders were never told the subpoenas targeted members of Congress. Smith said he did not believe identifying them was required by DOJ policy at the time.

DOJ's own Public Integrity Section approved targeting Jordan's records in April 2022

The transcripts also shed light on how investigators handled the phone records of Jordan himself, the man now leading the congressional inquiry into their conduct. Page seven of Duree's transcript states that the DOJ's Public Integrity Section knew investigators were seeking Jordan's phone records when it approved the investigative step in April 2022.

But the agent who actually served the subpoena to Verizon had no idea whose records he was pulling. Brian Burnett, an Office of Inspector General agent with 15 years at the DOJ inspector general's office before retiring in 2024, testified that prosecutors gave him only phone numbers, no names.

Burnett, who previously spent nine years as a senior narcotics detective with the Chesterfield County Sheriff's Office near Richmond, Virginia, said he did not learn the number might belong to Jordan until after he had already left the government:

"It was not until I had been retired and this was on the news and there was conversation about Mr. Jordan's toll records being subpoenaed and then there was a subpoena that came up on the internet."

Even at the time of his testimony, Burnett said he could not confirm the number was Jordan's: "But I do not know, as we sit here today, if that was his number or not."

The structure Burnett described was unusual in a more fundamental way. Prosecutors, not agents, directed investigative steps that would ordinarily fall to law enforcement. When a forensics agent received results from a subpoena, the results went back to the prosecutor, not to the agent who had served the subpoena. Burnett said he had never encountered that arrangement in his career.

Asked whether he had ever seen prosecutors dictate the investigation in that manner, Burnett was direct:

"Not in my entire 30 years of law enforcement."

A separate veteran agent assigned to the Jeffrey Clark investigation, whose name was not disclosed in the transcripts, offered a similar assessment, calling the probe's operation "unique, as far as the over 30 years of law enforcement experience I have." Two career agents, each with three decades of experience, independently flagged the same problem: this investigation did not run the way investigations are supposed to run.

Questions about how federal law enforcement operates under political pressure have surfaced repeatedly in recent years. The current FBI leadership under Director Kash Patel has signaled a different direction for the bureau, one shaped in part by the controversies now documented in these transcripts.

Smith's team claimed vigilance on Speech or Debate protections, but case law was thin

The Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause shields members of Congress from being questioned about their legislative acts by the executive branch. Subpoenaing a lawmaker's phone records without notice raises obvious tension with that protection.

Duree testified that Smith's team took the clause seriously:

"I would say we were hypervigilant and extremely aware of the contours of the Speech or Debate Clause. We knew that Speech or Debate was something that we had to navigate. We treated it seriously."

But Duree also acknowledged that the legal terrain was not well-mapped. He described running into "the corners of the law that aren't fully built out", a common challenge in complex investigations, he said. He did not concede that obtaining the records violated the clause, but he acknowledged a lack of clarity on certain points.

Prosecutor Ray Hulser offered additional detail about the internal process. He testified that Smith personally discussed the selection of which lawmakers to subpoena and insisted on written justifications for each one:

"Well, I talked with him about it. And, as we got into the May subpoenas, you could see, not only was it [a] narrow list of people, but there were written justifications for it. So he wanted to be very careful if we were going to be getting subpoenas for members."

Smith's defenders point to that care as evidence the investigation followed proper procedures. His critics see it differently: written justifications drafted by the same prosecutors who wanted the records, reviewed by no outside authority, with the targeted lawmakers gagged from even knowing they should hire a lawyer. That is not oversight. That is a closed loop.

The broader pattern of the Biden-era DOJ using aggressive tactics against political opponents has drawn sustained scrutiny. Cases involving armed FBI raids on nonviolent targets have fueled the argument that the department under the previous administration treated enforcement as a political instrument rather than a neutral function of government.

Jordan's criminal referral puts Smith's conduct squarely before the DOJ he once led

Jordan's criminal referral against Smith adds a new layer to the dispute. The referral asks the DOJ to examine whether Smith's actions during the investigation crossed legal lines, a request now directed at the same department Smith once represented.

The committee's broader findings go beyond the six transcripts released Tuesday. The Washington Examiner reported that Smith's eight-hour deposition on December 17, whose transcript and video the committee released on New Year's Eve, revealed previously undisclosed details about covert subpoenas and weaknesses in the January 6 investigation. Smith defended both of his criminal cases against Trump during that session, though both were ultimately dismissed.

The committee report alleges that Smith's team bypassed the established Filter Team to access actual message content from lawmakers, not just the toll records Smith told Congress his team had obtained. If true, that discrepancy could expose Smith to perjury charges, a possibility the committee's report flagged explicitly.

Smith has maintained throughout that his team acted lawfully and consistently with DOJ policy. He told the committee he believed the evidence against Trump was strong enough to sustain convictions in both cases. Neither case reached a jury.

The transcripts released Tuesday do not resolve every question. The testimony of two of the six witnesses, prosecutors J.P. Cooney and Molly Gaston, received no detailed coverage, and the substance of their interviews remains unclear. Whether all 17 or more targeted lawmakers have been identified, and what the full scope of the seized communications includes, are questions the committee's investigation has not yet answered publicly.

Concerns about politically motivated federal investigations have become a recurring theme under both administrations. Allegations involving the misuse of FBI files and intelligence tools for political advantage continue to surface across party lines, reinforcing public skepticism about whether the DOJ operates as a neutral institution.

When career agents with 30 years of experience say they have never seen anything like it, and the prosecutors who ran it cannot even remember whose records they pulled, the question is no longer whether the system worked. It is whether anyone in charge intended it to.