By Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) - Former U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith's team reviewed text messages from 44 Republican and Democratic members of Congress during his investigation into President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to two Republican senators.
The records came from subpoenas to the National Archives and Records Administration for text messages from government phones used by Trump and a range of his top officials and advisers from October
2020 until the end of his first term in January 2021.
The records Smith's team obtained included text messages that 40 Republican lawmakers and four Democrats exchanged with Trump officials, according to Republican Senators Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Ron Johnson, the chair of a Senate investigative panel.
The new material underscores how many senior figures in the U.S. government were examined as Smith investigated Trump's attempts to reverse his defeat to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 and his alleged mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort during Biden's administration. Both cases were dropped after Trump won the 2024 election.
The officials included Trump's former chief of staff Mark Meadows and then-Vice President Mike Pence, who resisted Trump’s pressure to block congressional certification of the 2020 election results.
Grassley released the material the day before Todd Blanche, who defended Trump against both of Smith's cases, goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his nomination to serve as attorney general.
Justice Department officials under Trump have provided Grassley with a range of records as the president's allies press claims that Smith’s investigations were improperly aimed at damaging Trump’s political prospects and swept up sensitive information irrelevant to those cases.
“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,” Grassley said in a statement.
A spokesperson for Smith did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the disclosures. Smith has argued in court filings and in public testimony that his investigations followed Justice Department policy and were not influenced by politics.
Grassley alleged that a prosecutor on Smith’s team appeared to violate Justice Department protocol by viewing the records before a separate team screened them for potential legal privileges. The filter review team was set up to separate material involving attorney communications with clients, not members of Congress.
Grassley previously revealed that Smith obtained call logs from some Republican senators around the time of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. FBI Director Kash Patel and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles also had their phone records subpoenaed as part of the classified documents probe, Reuters has reported.
Subpoenaing phone records is a common step in federal investigations. Smith previously told a House committee that lawmakers’ phone records were necessary to investigate Trump’s pressure campaign to stop certification of his election defeat.
(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Michael Learmonth and Jamie Freed)
