Jack Smith Could Be In Trouble After Latest Revelation On Lawmaker Texts

Jim Jordan sending a criminal referral is not exactly a surprise plot twist. But the underlying fact here deserves more attention than it's getting: Jack Smith's team reportedly pulled text messages from dozens of sitting members of Congress while chasing Trump. That's not a footnote. That's the legislative branch getting swept up in a surveillance dragnet built for one man, with apparently little regard for who else got caught in it.

Smith's defenders will say this is just how modern investigations work, that phone records and metadata get pulled in bulk and most of it never sees daylight. Maybe. But "trust the process" only goes so far when the process in question was run by a prosecutor who spent two years building a case against a former president and possible future one, and did it with tools broad enough to snag communications from lawmakers who had nothing to do with January 6th planning or anything else under investigation. If the shoe were on the other foot, if a Trump-appointed special counsel had quietly obtained texts from four dozen Democrats while investigating a Democratic president, nobody in the press would be calling it routine.

None of this proves criminal wrongdoing by Smith personally, and a referral from Jordan is a political document as much as a legal one. But the House deserves a real accounting of whose messages were pulled, on what legal basis, and why Congress is only finding out about it now. Oversight of the investigators is not obstruction. It's the job.