Jack Smith's Trump probe swept up Fox News, other media

nearly 50 journalists. Not a handful of accidental contacts, not a couple of loose ends. Jack Smith's investigators went out of their way to collect records of communications between reporters and government officials while they were hunting President Trump. If you believe that's just standard practice, then you've already accepted something that should bother every American who doesn't work for the Department of Justice. It's one thing to subpoena a suspect's phone records. It's another to cast a net over the press.

The reaction from the media has been telling. The same outlets that spent four years warning about Trump's supposed threat to the fourth estate suddenly have nothing to say when the threat comes from a special counsel's office. Maybe they're embarrassed. Maybe they're worried the story gets too close to home. But the media's silence is deafening, and it's not hard to figure out why. This time the journalists aren't the heroes of the narrative. They're just the names on a list.

What Jack Smith did here is not a technicality. It's a chilling signal to every reporter and every source: talk to the wrong person, and the government can come for your relationships too. The left has spent years claiming that only Trump would abuse the machinery of the state. Yet here we are, with special counsel investigators pulling up the communications between the press and officials in the administration they were trying to bring down. This was never about justice. It was about power, and the press was just another obstacle to remove.

We don't need to defend every decision Trump made to see what happened here. A special counsel should be investigating crimes, not mapping out who talks to whom. The records of nearly 50 journalists should serve as a warning to every reporter who thinks the surveillance state will only ever target its enemies. Eventually, it comes for the watchers themselves. And when it does, the people who cheered it on will pretend they didn't notice.