Former special counsel Jack Smith’s team used grand jury subpoenas to quietly obtain more than two years of phone records, text-message logs, and financial information belonging to Kash Patel, now the director of the FBI, while Patel was a private citizen, according to documents released by Sen. Chuck Grassley ahead of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the investigation known as Arctic Frost.
The subpoenas, issued to Verizon, came with court-authorized gag orders that barred the company from telling Patel his records had been swept up. A federal magistrate judge approved the nondisclosure orders, citing risks of evidence destruction, witness tampering, and jeopardy to the investigation. Patel learned about the subpoenas only recently and called them “outrageous and deeply alarming.”
The disclosure lands at a moment when Republican lawmakers are pressing hard on what they describe as a pattern of political weaponization inside the Biden-era Justice Department. And the scope of the records sought, phone metadata, credit card statements, bank account details, IP addresses, and more, goes well beyond a routine inquiry into a single witness.
Grassley, the senior Iowa Republican, released the tranche of documents on Tuesday, just before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing examining Arctic Frost, the FBI investigation that led to Smith prosecuting President Donald Trump over the 2020 election. Fox News Digital reported that two subpoenas showed Smith’s team asked Verizon for Patel’s phone records spanning October 2020 through February 2023. Each subpoena carried a one-year gag order, and Verizon was ordered by the court not to alert Patel of their existence.
The records request was broad. Newsmax, citing a Reuters review of the grand jury subpoenas and nondisclosure orders, reported that Smith’s team sought not just phone metadata but also text-message logs, online usernames, mailing and email addresses, billing and IP addresses, and bank account information. One subpoena covered January 1, 2021, to November 23, 2023. Another covered October 1, 2020, through February 22, 2023.
That means investigators were collecting data on Patel’s communications for a period that stretched from the final months of the first Trump administration through well after Smith’s appointment as special counsel in November 2022.
The New York Post reported that Smith’s investigation subpoenaed hundreds of pages of Patel’s phone records, credit card records, and other bank information. The nondisclosure orders were approved by then-D.C. U.S. Magistrate Judge James Mazzone.
Reuters said it could not determine what specific wrongdoing Patel was suspected of.
Patel was not the only target. Grassley said the released records show Smith’s team compiled what the senator called a “wish list” naming 14 members of Congress whose toll records they wanted to seek. Just The News reported that the subpoenas were made public ahead of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Arctic Frost, and that Grassley framed the list as raising serious questions about Smith’s conduct and candor.
In prepared opening remarks, Grassley put it bluntly:
“The records include a wish list created by Smith’s team naming 14 members of Congress for whom they wanted to seek tolling data. Some of those members are senators on this very Committee.”
That detail transforms the story from a dispute about one man’s phone records into something far larger. If Smith’s prosecutors were building target lists of sitting lawmakers’ communications data, the oversight questions multiply fast, especially when the whole operation ran under court-imposed secrecy.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, opened the hearing by drawing a direct line between the Biden DOJ’s conduct and the most infamous abuse-of-power scandal in American history. Cruz did not mince words:
“If Watergate taught us anything, it is that even a single abuse of power carried out by a handful of individuals can shake the foundations of our republic.”
He went further, labeling the broader effort “a modern Watergate” and describing its reach in stark terms:
“But what we confront today, the Biden administration’s Arctic Frost scheme is not a single act. It is a modern Watergate, trading a break-in at one office for a digital sweep into approximately 100,000 private communications. More than a dozen senators and thousands of individuals lives.”
One hundred thousand private communications. More than a dozen senators. Those numbers, if accurate, describe a surveillance dragnet that dwarfs the original Watergate break-in in both scale and ambition, all conducted under the color of law, with gag orders ensuring the targets never knew.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., offered a different reading. He argued during the hearing that Smith had an “obvious” reason to examine Patel’s records: Patel had made himself a fact witness in the classified-documents investigation by talking publicly about what he claimed to have seen.
“Patel made himself a fact witness in that investigation. He went on podcasts bragging about how he planned to post classified information online at Donald Trump’s direction, and how he’d personally witnessed Donald Trump declassify records.”
Whitehouse’s argument amounts to a familiar progressive claim, that aggressive investigation of political opponents is justified when those opponents speak publicly about disputed facts. But the argument sidesteps the central issue. Patel was a private citizen when Smith’s team vacuumed up years of his phone, financial, and communication records under seal. The question is not whether prosecutors found Patel interesting. The question is whether the scope, secrecy, and breadth of what they did was proportionate, or whether it was the kind of fishing expedition that the Fourth Amendment exists to prevent.
Notably, S1 reports it remains unclear which specific investigation the Patel subpoenas pertained to. Patel was a known witness in the separate classified-documents probe, but the subpoenas were released in connection with Arctic Frost, the January 6 investigation. That ambiguity matters. If prosecutors were pulling records across multiple probes and attaching gag orders to each, the potential for abuse compounds.
The Grassley document release also included briefing materials prepared by Smith’s team for Attorney General Merrick Garland. Those materials noted that meetings were happening among top FBI and DOJ officials and D.C. federal judges, a detail that suggests a level of institutional coordination well above the line-prosecutor level. The briefings described the investigation as “going well.”
The materials also showed that Smith was relying on the Democrat-led January 6 Committee’s work to help with his investigation. That committee, which operated without meaningful Republican participation after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected GOP picks, has long been criticized by conservatives as a partisan exercise. Smith’s documented reliance on its output raises fresh questions about whether the special counsel’s work inherited that committee’s political DNA, a concern that echoes broader patterns of disputed prosecutorial conduct that have drawn judicial scrutiny.
FBI spokesman Ben Williamson addressed the revelations directly. “The FBI under prior leadership was weaponized in ways the American people are only now beginning to fully grasp,” Williamson told Reuters. That statement, from the current FBI’s own spokesman, is an extraordinary institutional admission. The bureau is, in effect, accusing its former leadership of political abuse.
Smith became special counsel in November 2022, appointed by Garland. He resigned when Trump took office. He has since appeared before Congress for both public and closed-door testimony and has repeatedly defended his work as by-the-book and apolitical. But the documents Grassley released tell a different story, one of sweeping subpoenas, sealed gag orders, coordination with a partisan congressional committee, and a target list that included sitting members of Congress.
Following Smith’s appointment, his office fired off hundreds of subpoenas with nondisclosure orders targeting more than 400 Republican individuals and groups, including Patel. Grassley called the requests a “wish list” that raises “additional questions about Smith’s conduct, need for member data and candor to the court and the public.” The scale alone, 400-plus targets, all Republican, strains any claim of nonpartisan intent.
The hearing and document release come as congressional Republicans continue to press oversight of Biden-era DOJ conduct, including subpoenas related to the department’s handling of sensitive files. The emerging picture is one of an institution that used its most powerful tools, grand jury subpoenas, gag orders, judicial secrecy, to build cases against political opponents while keeping those opponents, and the public, in the dark.
Grassley summarized the stakes plainly: “My oversight of Arctic Frost has proven the more you dig, the more you find.”
When a government secretly collects years of a citizen’s phone calls, texts, bank records, and IP addresses, and a court orders the phone company to stay silent, that citizen had better be suspected of something serious. If the best explanation anyone can offer is that he talked too much on podcasts, the problem isn’t the citizen. It’s the government.
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