Jack Smith sat before Congress in January and defended every decision his team made.
Now his own prosecutors are talking – under oath, on the record, to the people he investigated.
What they admitted about who knew what – and when – contradicts everything Smith has claimed.
Arctic Frost Transcripts Show an Investigation Unlike Anything in 30 Years of Law Enforcement
The House Judiciary Committee published six transcripts – five from Smith's former prosecutors and one from a DOJ inspector general agent – and the operation they describe rewrote its own rules from the top down.
Arctic Frost was Biden's DOJ code name for the Jan. 6 investigation targeting Trump and his allies.
Brian Burnett retired in 2024 after three decades in law enforcement – nine years as a narcotics detective in suburban Richmond, Virginia, then fifteen at the DOJ's inspector general's office.
Committee investigators asked Burnett whether he had ever encountered a case where prosecutors dictated the investigation the way Smith's team did.
"Not in my entire 30 years of law enforcement," Burnett testified.
That structure meant something specific. When a forensics agent received results from a subpoena, those results flowed back to the prosecutor – not to the agent who had issued the subpoena. Smith's team controlled the information. Subordinates received instructions.
In Burnett's case, that meant he helped gather phone data from a number tied to Jim Jordan and did not know it. He did not learn it was Jordan's until after his retirement, when the story surfaced publicly.
Burnett testified he would have raised the issue with his superiors if he had known.
His superiors knew.
Biden DOJ Approved Jordan's Subpoena Then Used a Gag Order to Keep Him in the Dark
The name didn't disappear by accident.
Page seven of Smith prosecutor Tad Duree's transcript makes it clear what happened. The DOJ's Public Integrity Section approved the subpoena for Jordan's specific number in April 2022. Burnett – the agent sent to execute it – was handed a phone number and nothing else.
This was not an oversight. The investigation ran top down, with prosecutors controlling what agents knew and when they knew it.
The gag orders compounded everything. After investigators subpoenaed records from phone carriers like Verizon, federal judges signed nondisclosure orders preventing those carriers from telling the subscriber the government had come asking.
Duree acknowledged in his testimony that this blocked lawmakers from challenging the subpoenas.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, never saw a subpoena. His carrier did. A nondisclosure order made sure Roy never found out.
Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., got less cover than Roy. Agents tracked his phone's location to a New Jersey vacation, showed up, took the device, copied it, and handed it back.
Duree insisted his team handled the Speech or Debate Clause – the constitutional provision shielding lawmakers' communications from executive branch interference – with extreme care. He described their approach as "hypervigilant."
Smith's Reach Extended to 44 Members of Congress and the Lies Are Getting Bigger
Today's transcripts are one piece of a much larger reckoning.
In July, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley revealed that Smith's team secretly read the actual text message contents of 44 members of Congress – messages swept up from National Archives records of Trump White House phones.
Grassley said Smith's investigation was "a runaway train that had no brakes."
Smith was asked under oath last December whether his team reviewed the content of lawmakers' text messages. He said no. DOJ records released in July prove 44 members' texts were read. Grassley called out the discrepancy by name.
The DOJ's own Public Integrity Section had warned Smith's team that accessing those messages would violate the Speech or Debate Clause. The team read them anyway. Then Smith told Congress it never happened.
The operation was built on controlled ignorance at every level.
Sen. Ted Cruz called the full picture a modern Watergate. Nixon's men broke into an office to steal political intelligence from one campaign.
Smith's team broke into the phone records and text messages of an entire branch of government – and used federal judges, gag orders, and a top-down chain of command to make sure no one found out until it was too late to stop them.
They almost got away with it.
Sources:
- Stepheny Price, Leo Briceno, and Charles Creitz, "House Republicans drop Jack Smith transcripts in explosive Arctic Frost records fight," Fox News, September 22, 2026.
- "Agent in Jack Smith case says he was kept in dark that subpoenaed phone data belonged to Congress," Just the News, September 22, 2026.
- Emily Kopp, "Unearthed Records Reveal Scale Of Jack Smith's Arctic Frost Text Message Spying Spree," The Daily Caller, July 14, 2026.
- "Documents Shed New Light on How Far the Arctic Frost Probe Went," The Daily Signal, March 24, 2026.
