Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz confronted former Special Counsel Jack Smith during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, accusing his office of secretly obtaining the phone records and text messages of dozens of members of Congress without providing the notification required under the Constitution and federal law.
The exchange, which spread rapidly across conservative social media accounts including @seanhannity, @RealAmVoice, and @bennyjohnson, centered on allegations that Smith's team subpoenaed records tied to forty-four members of Congress, concealed the identity of those targets from the court, and obtained a gag order preventing phone companies from notifying the members whose records were sought.
Hawley opened his questioning by asserting that Smith's office sought senators' phone records and text messages despite knowing the Constitution protects members of Congress' work product. "The only problem was the Constitution protects members of Congress' work product and their phone records. And you knew that was the case, didn't you?" Hawley said.
Smith responded that he understood there are constitutional protections and that his team followed the Constitution. Hawley rejected that answer, citing a memo from Smith's own office dated January 8, 2023, authored by Assistant Special Counsel John M. Pelletier, entitled "Speech or Debate Litigation Summary." According to Hawley, that memo informed Smith that the Rayburn decision required the government to give members of Congress the opportunity to assert privilege, regardless of whether investigators went to the members directly or to phone companies.
"You decided to ignore that, blow right through it," Hawley said. "You went to the phone companies, and you hid the fact from the court that you were seeking the records of members of Congress, didn't you?"
Smith acknowledged that his office did not identify who the subpoenas were for when seeking a nondisclosure order. Hawley then read from Smith's prior deposition testimony before the House, in which he was asked whether the judge knew it was a member of Congress when the orders were sought. Smith replied at the time, "I don't think we identified that."
According to @seanhannity, who posted the exchange along with a transcript, Hawley further charged that Smith's office obtained a gag order to prevent phone companies from notifying members of Congress, despite a federal law requiring such notification. "You got the court under false pretenses to prevent the companies from doing so," Hawley said. "Any time the law stood in your way, any time the Constitution stood in your way, you just ignored it."
Hawley then turned to what he described as a contradiction in Smith's testimony. He said that on December 17, 2025, Smith told the House he had never gotten text messages from members of Congress. Hawley showed Smith an exchange in which he was asked whether he sought a search warrant for the content of any text messages of members. Smith, according to the transcript, replied, "I don't recall that," and confirmed it was "just toll records."
But Hawley said that two full years earlier, on June 2, 2023, Smith had demanded from the National Archives records that included text messages from forty-four United States Senators and members of Congress, and that he received all of those records. Hawley said the Department of Justice disclosed that within an hour of receiving those text messages, Smith's team was reading them.
"That was a lie, Mr. Smith," Hawley said. "And you may try your lawyerly way out of it, while it wasn't from the member, it was from the archives, you knew exactly what you were being asked. And you deliberately misled them."
Smith responded, "I answered every question I was asked truthfully. I am proud of our investigation."
Hawley shot back, "No, well, you shouldn't be. You should be totally ashamed."
Hawley concluded by saying Smith had lied to the court, to Congress, and to the American people, calling it "the worst abuse of prosecutorial power in the history of the United States." He added, "If it were up to me, I'd charge you with perjury. But you should certainly be disbarred."
The hearing also featured a separate exchange between Senator Ted Cruz and Smith, posted by @RealAmVoice, in which Cruz pressed Smith on whether his team had subpoenaed conservative organizations. Cruz asked, "Did your team subpoena the RNC?" Smith replied, "It is very possible." When asked whether his team subpoenaed Turning Point USA, Smith said, "I would have to look."
Cruz then asked, "Did your team subpoena the Conservative Partnership Institute?" Smith replied, "That I do remember, yes. Okay, good. We found one. And I can explain."
The confrontation drew immediate reaction from conservative commentators. @bennyjohnson posted that Hawley "just GRILLED Jack Smith for Illegally Obtaining 44 members of Congress' Text Messages," calling the line of questioning a demonstration of "the systematic process Jack Smith went through to spy on members of Congress with blatant disregard for the Constitution."
@seanhannity shared the exchange with the caption, "'That was a lie, Mr. Smith.' Josh Hawley confronts Jack Smith over records tied to 44 members of Congress, citing prior testimony and documents as he presses the former special counsel on what his team obtained and disclosed."
@RealAmVoice posted, "@HawleyMO RIPS into Jack Smith," quoting Hawley's charge that Smith told the House two full years later that he had never gotten messages, calling it a lie. The same account also highlighted Cruz's questioning, posting, "@TedCruz RIPS Jack Smith for targeting conservatives."
The hearing came one day after Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, spoke on the Senate floor to preview the Judiciary Committee hearing and to criticize what he described as Trump's illegal "pocket rescission" of nearly one billion dollars of funding Congress had already approved. Durbin's remarks, posted by @SenatorDurbin, reflected the competing priorities Democrats brought to the same proceeding.
Next News Network could not independently verify the claims made during the hearing regarding the scope of the subpoenas, the notification provided to members of Congress, or the contents of the internal Justice Department memos cited by Hawley.
Our Take
Jack Smith spent years presenting himself as the embodiment of impartial justice, a special counsel above politics, tasked with investigating a former president with the full weight of the federal government behind him. What Tuesday's hearing revealed, if the documents and testimony cited by Senator Hawley are accurate, is that Smith's operation was anything but impartial. It was a prosecution in search of a crime, willing to trample the Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause protections, willing to conceal its targets from the court, willing to gag the phone companies that by law were supposed to notify members of Congress, and willing to mislead the House under oath when asked directly whether it had obtained members' text messages.
The pattern here is not sloppiness. It is design. When the law stood in the way, Smith's team went around it. When the Constitution required notification, they skipped it. When a federal statute required phone companies to tell members their records were being sought, Smith got a gag order instead. And when Congress finally asked the right questions, Smith answered with lawyerly evasions and professions of pride in an investigation that, by his own office's documents, treated the legislative branch as an obstacle to be outmaneuvered.
Hawley said he would charge Smith with perjury if it were up to him. That is not going to happen in a Washington where the same people who demanded accountability for Trump have spent years excusing every excess of the officials who came to take him down. But the American people deserve to know exactly what their government did, to whom, and under what false pretenses. The Senate Judiciary Committee has now put that question on the record. The rest of us should not let it disappear into the same memory hole that swallowed so many other abuses of the Trump years.
