Senate Judiciary puts Jack Smith testimony in Arctic Frost oversight on ice

WASHINGTON (CN) — Former special counsel Jack Smith will not testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee until it completes its oversight of the prosecutor’s investigations into President Donald Trump, the panel’s Republican chairman said Thursday.

Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley told members of the committee that the investigative record into Smith’s 2020 election interference case was not “entirely ready,” and doubled down on resistance to Democratic demands that the former special counsel testify in a similar setting to his House hearing earlier this year.

“This committee is not going to give in to Democrats’ ill-advised strategy to bring Jack Smith before our investigative record is entirely ready” said Grassley, who quoted media reports that the “facts are getting uglier” in his probe into the former special counsel.

Grassley in recent months has investigated Smith’s prosecution of then-former president Trump during the Biden administration. The former special counsel charged Trump over his role in efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as well as his handling of classified documents after he left office. Both cases were dropped after Trump was reelected in 2024.

The Republican-led Judiciary Committee has published documents from the election interference investigation, codenamed Arctic Frost, which they said points to a coordinated effort by prosecutors to spy on GOP lawmakers by collecting their phone toll records in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Members of Congress subject to the record collection — which did not include the content of calls or messages but contained information such as timestamps, conversation length and participants — were not immediately alerted to the surveillance thanks to judicial gag orders, Grassley has said.

And ahead of an Arctic Frost hearing on Tuesday, the Judiciary Committee published additional documents showing Smith had also subpoenaed phone records from FBI Director Kash Patel, then an official in the first Trump administration. Smith’s team also compiled what Grassley called a “wish list” of 14 lawmakers whose tolling data they wanted to obtain.

“Overall, the records create additional questions about Smith’s conduct, need for member data and candor to the court and the public,” the Iowa Republican said in opening remarks at Tuesday’s hearing.

The Judiciary Committee chair added that he’d rejected calls from Democrats to bring Smith in for testimony, arguing that if he’d relented “we wouldn’t have the information we have now” and claiming the special counsel misled Congress “if not outright lied.”

Smith, for his part, has defended efforts to secure Republican toll records as part of his election interference probe. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee in January, the former special counsel said it was “common practice” in criminal investigations, and he’d sought the records with approval from the Justice Department’s public integrity section.

Grassley’s latest Arctic Frost revelations this week came from a trove of related documents provided to lawmakers this month by the Justice Department. But it wasn’t just Republicans who were incensed by the information the agency handed over.

House Democrats on Tuesday penned a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi claiming that the Justice Department had inadvertently included information in the documents drop that appeared to be subject to a judicial gag order which has for more than a year blocked the release of details related to the Trump classified documents case.

And the Democrats, led by Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, said that the released documents also present “damning” new evidence that Trump improperly retained highly sensitive information pertaining to his business interests, and that the then-former president showed a classified map to people traveling on a private plane.

Speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, California Senator Adam Schiff pointed out Smith has long been subject to the gag order, signed in January 2025 by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, and has been unable to discuss the contents of his report on the classified documents case.

Schiff urged his fellow lawmakers to “weigh in” with the court to get access to Smith’s report, perhaps in a private, “in camera” setting, ahead of a possible future hearing with the former special counsel.

“We may be very frustrated in our questioning of Mr. Smith unless we can get that report, that second volume, released,” Schiff said.

Grassley did not immediately reject the idea, asking Schiff to follow up with his staff. A spokesperson for the chairman’s office did not return a request for comment on whether the committee might ask Cannon to permit lawmakers to seek access to the classified documents report.

Both the Justice Department and the White House have slammed Democrats for the suggestion that the Arctic Frost documents drop implicated Trump in mishandling classified documents.

“Jack Smith is a proven liar, consistent with these fake accusations from his failed vendetta against the President,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a post on X Thursday morning. “There is absolutely zero proof of wrongdoing, which is precisely why they didn’t include it in their indictment that was tossed out by the court.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday called Raskin’s letter to Bondi a “cheap political stunt” and accused him of citing “untrue and salacious claims” from Smith’s report.

The Justice Department has also denied that the documents it provided Congress violated Cannon’s gag order. A spokesperson said the information had been properly redacted, and nothing made available to lawmakers appeared before a grand jury, despite Raskin’s claim that “many” of the documents the agency sent Congress on the classified documents case were marked as sealed grand jury material.

Following Trump’s election to a second term, the Justice Department dropped both the election interference case and classified documents case.

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