Former Special Counsel Jack Smith spent years building criminal cases against Donald Trump. Now House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan has sent a criminal referral to the Department of Justice — against Smith himself — accusing him of making false statements under oath to Congress about his team's access to the private text messages of more than 40 lawmakers.
The man who led the Trump prosecutions is now the subject of one.
Jordan's referral, sent to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche on July 22, centers on Smith's testimony from last year in which he was questioned about his team's handling of congressional phone records. According to Just the News, the committee found evidence that Smith's team accessed the actual content of members' text messages — not just the toll records and telephone metadata Smith described under oath.
"This information calls into question the completeness and accuracy of statements that Mr. Smith made under oath to the Committee regarding his team's access to the content of Members' text messages," Jordan wrote in the referral.
That's a polite way of saying the committee believes he lied.
The distinction matters. There's a canyon-sized difference between pulling phone metadata — who called whom, when, for how long — and reading the actual text message content of sitting members of Congress. Smith's testimony gave Congress one impression. The evidence, according to Jordan, tells a different story.
Of course the top Democrat on the committee Rep. Jamie Raskin rushed to Smith's defense, calling the referral an embarrassment. "Jack Smith was clear and consistent in his testimony, and he told the truth," Raskin said. He then offered what may be the most creative legal defense of the year: "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."
Telepathic. The argument isn't that Smith disclosed everything and the committee misunderstood. The argument is that they didn't ask the right questions, so it's their fault they didn't get the right answers. That's not a defense of honesty. That's a defense of evasion — and there's a legal term for the kind of evasion that happens under oath.
The referral now sits with Todd Blanche at DOJ. Whether it results in charges is another question entirely. But the mere existence of a formal criminal referral — from a congressional committee chairman to the attorney general — against the man who prosecuted a former president is without modern precedent.
More than 40 members of Congress had their private communications accessed by a special counsel's office that may have misrepresented what it actually saw. That's not a procedural footnote. That's a question about whether the most powerful prosecutor in the country was straight with the branch of government that's supposed to oversee him.
The referral is on Blanche's desk. The testimony is on the record. The only question left is whether the standard Smith applied to everyone else applies to him too.
