Sen. Marsha Blackburn has sued former special counsel Jack Smith in his personal capacity after his office secretly obtained her phone toll records in the Arctic Frost investigation.
The Tennessee Republican filed the case one day after Smith faced the Senate Judiciary Committee. She argues he never held lawful authority to wield special-counsel power and that the secret seizure violated her rights as a sitting senator.
Fox News reported that the New Civil Liberties Alliance brought the action on Blackburn’s behalf. The complaint asks a federal court to declare Smith’s appointment unconstitutional, order the phone records destroyed or returned, and award $1 in nominal damages.
Blackburn made plain what the suit is about.
“This lawsuit is solely about holding Mr. Smith accountable and ensuring that our nation’s justice system can never again be weaponized against the American people,”
She went further on the probe itself.
“Through his Arctic Frost witch-hunt that targeted conservatives across America and even the president of the United States, Jack Smith perpetrated one of the worst abuses of government power in our nation’s history,”
In May 2023, Smith’s office issued a grand-jury subpoena for Verizon toll records. A separate court-approved nondisclosure order barred the company from telling affected customers, including Blackburn.
The records did not capture the content of calls. They showed whom the senator contacted, when the calls occurred, and how long they lasted.
Just the News noted that Smith obtained phone records of several senators the same way and locked in a nondisclosure order so the carrier could not alert the lawmakers. Blackburn’s suit says the move violated the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause and blocked her from challenging the seizure in real time.
The complaint further alleges Smith’s team secured that nondisclosure order without telling the judge the subpoena targeted a sitting U.S. senator. That detail sits at the center of the rights claim.
Smith later acknowledged he approved subpoenas aimed at members of Congress even though he understood the nondisclosure orders would keep those lawmakers from raising Speech or Debate challenges.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance frames the core defect as constitutional from day one. Attorney General Merrick Garland named Smith special counsel in November 2022. NCLA says then-President Biden never nominated him, the Senate never confirmed him, and no statute authorized the appointment.
“Jack Smith was illegally named Special Counsel in November of 2022, with Attorney General Merrick Garland handing a private citizen the sweeping powers of a special counsel,”
NCLA counsel L. Margaret Harker tied the personal-capacity suit to larger limits on the Justice Department.
“This lawsuit is not only about the faux authority granted to Smith through an unconstitutional appointment. It is also about ensuring that the Department of Justice, the very body responsible for enforcing federal law on behalf of our nation, acts only within its constitutional bounds,”
Arctic Frost began as an FBI investigation into President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents and alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Garland later handed the probe to Smith. Senate Judiciary Committee records show Smith’s team issued 197 subpoenas to 34 individuals and 163 businesses, seeking information that touched at least 430 Republican individuals and entities.
That volume landed hard when Smith appeared before the committee. Chairman Charles Grassley opened the Tuesday hearing with a sharp rebuke and accused the prosecutors of sweeping up communications between journalists at Fox News and other outlets and sources linked to the first Trump administration. The same hearing set the stage for Blackburn’s filing the next day, continuing the scrutiny that followed Smith’s Senate Judiciary appearance on the Arctic Frost probe.
The Washington Examiner reported that the Arctic Frost effort secretly pulled phone records from several Republican lawmakers and that Blackburn’s suit directly challenges the appointment as unlawful. Smith had already drawn intense questioning over his Trump election investigation before the panel.
At the hearing Smith stood by his work. He said his investigation “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation.”
The personal lawsuit still names him as John L. Smith and treats him as a private citizen for alleged constitutional and civil-rights violations tied to the subpoena and the gag order. Fox News Digital reached out to his counsel for comment.
Smith’s earlier career includes a stint leading the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. One high-profile case from that period involved former Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell; the Supreme Court later unanimously vacated the conviction. He also prosecuted matters before the International Criminal Court before taking the special-counsel role.
Those details matter less to Blackburn than the concrete steps taken against a sitting senator: a sealed subpoena, a silent nondisclosure order, and no chance to invoke Speech or Debate protections until after the fact. The pattern has already produced political aftershocks, including the rapid collapse of one senator’s trial-balloon moment in the wake of the same Smith hearing stumble.
The complaint is narrow on remedies and broad on principle. It wants the appointment declared unlawful under the Appointments Clause. It wants the toll records destroyed or returned. It seeks one dollar. The dollar is not the point. The point is a judicial finding that a private citizen cannot be handed special-counsel power without nomination, confirmation, or statutory backing, then use that power to vacuum up a senator’s call metadata in secret.
Blackburn thanked the New Civil Liberties Alliance for taking the case. The group describes itself as nonpartisan and focused on constitutional limits. Its filing lands amid wider Republican efforts to police executive overreach, the same impulse visible when Senate Republicans moved against a decades-old loophole on detained illegal immigrants.
Smith later appeared for a closed-door deposition before the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 17, 2025, after a subpoena about the Trump investigations. Blackburn herself spoke at an earlier Judiciary appearance on Oct. 7, 2025, when Attorney General Pam Bondi testified. Those dates bookend a long stretch of oversight that finally produced a personal lawsuit.
The case does not ask for millions. It asks a court to say the appointment was void and the secret seizure of a senator’s records cannot stand. That is the accountability Blackburn described: no more weaponized justice, no more quiet end-runs around the Speech or Debate Clause, and no more private citizens exercising prosecutorial power the Constitution never gave them.
Voters who watch the Justice Department closely have seen this movie before, appointments stretched past their limits, records scooped up first and justified later, and elected officials left to discover the intrusion after the fact. The pattern also echoes other high-stakes legal fights over proper purpose and institutional power, including the recent judicial rebuke in Trump’s $10 billion IRS lawsuit.
When prosecutors treat senators’ phone metadata as fair game under a gag order the targets never see, the constitutional guardrails are already bent. Blackburn’s one-dollar demand forces a court to decide whether those guardrails still mean anything.
Accountability starts when the people who signed the subpoenas finally face the same rules they enforced on everyone else.
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