Thirty FBI agents swarmed Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and the whole world watched.
What the whole world didn't know is that the FBI's own agents had already concluded they didn't have the evidence to justify it.
What Senate Republicans built while Smith was taking victory laps is something he has never had to answer for.
Grassley Released the FBI Email That Proves the Mar-a-Lago Raid Had No Probable Cause
Senator Chuck Grassley released the email in January.
It came from agents at the FBI's Washington field office, dated weeks before the August 2022 raid, and it said flatly that the bureau did not believe probable cause existed to search the property.
Garland's DOJ raided it anyway – seized boxes of documents, seized Trump's phone, and handed the results to Jack Smith when Garland appointed him special counsel three months later.
Smith took that tainted foundation and used it to build a classified documents case that a federal judge threw out on constitutional grounds.
That is the foundation of the Senate's case against Smith: the investigation was not driven by evidence from the start.
It was driven by a decision already made, with evidence assembled afterward to justify it.
Grassley has been building this record since July 2022, when the first whistleblowers came to him with credible disclosures about Arctic Frost – the Biden Justice Department's operation against Trump and everyone connected to him.
What those whistleblowers started, two years of document production and telecom subpoenas finished.
Jack Smith Arctic Frost Subpoenas Targeted Over 400 Republicans With Secret Gag Orders
Arctic Frost was not an investigation of Trump.
It was a map of the entire American conservative movement.
Smith issued 197 subpoenas targeting more than 400 Republican individuals and organizations – Trump campaign staffers, conservative media groups, Republican attorneys general, state party chairs, and fundraising networks built over decades.
He subpoenaed the phone records of at least 20 current and former Republican members of Congress, then obtained court-issued gag orders to make sure every one of them stayed in the dark.
Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile received at least 84 Arctic Frost-related subpoenas and handed over congressional call records without notifying the senators whose data was being pulled.
Grassley's investigators found that Smith's own prosecutors had warned internally that pulling congressional phone records risked violating the Speech or Debate Clause – the constitutional protection that keeps federal prosecutors out of congressional business entirely.
Smith did it anyway.
When one carrier pushed back and Smith dropped a specific subpoena, Grassley made the obvious point: if the data were essential to the investigation, Smith wouldn't have folded the moment someone said no.
It wasn't essential. That was never the point.
Senator Ron Johnson called it "nothing short of a Biden administration enemies list" and said it was "orders of magnitude worse" than Watergate.
Lindsey Graham issued a statement after learning his own phone records had been subpoenaed and called it "the biggest violation of separation of powers in our nation's history."
Operation Rampart Twelve Exposed a Second Biden FBI Plot Against Republican Members of Congress
April 21 produced the next piece.
Senator Eric Schmitt chaired a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing that exposed Operation Rampart Twelve – a second Biden FBI operation targeting Republican members of Congress that nobody knew existed.
Text messages released at that hearing showed DOJ prosecutors raising legal concerns about their own conduct while pushing the operation forward anyway.
FBI Headquarters shut Rampart Twelve down a year later after finding no credible evidence.
Biden's DOJ ran that same play against Republicans from 2022 through 2024 – open an investigation, pull the records, seal the whole thing under court orders, and walk away quietly when nothing criminal turns up.
The documents also showed the Biden White House coordinating directly with Fani Willis's Fulton County District Attorney's office – the same office that indicted Trump on Georgia election charges later dismissed because Willis was found to have had an improper relationship with the special prosecutor she recruited.
Schmitt told The Washington Times he expects a summer hearing with Smith front and center in the Senate.
"I can't wait for Jack Smith to come," Schmitt said – then added the line that matters: "But before that happens, we need to make sure we have all the information. What we don't want to have is that Jack Smith is the only one who has been privy to a lot of this information."
That information is now in Republican hands.
The FBI email that said probable cause didn't exist. The internal warnings Smith's team ignored. The 197 subpoenas. The gag orders. The second operation nobody knew about and the text messages showing prosecutors knew it was legally questionable before they ran it.
Schmitt put it plainly: "He thought he was going to be some hero in this story. He's really a villain."
This summer, he'll have to say that under oath – in a room where the other side already has the receipts.
Sources:
- Alex Swoyer, "From Mar-a-Lago raid to phone record grabs, Republicans are readying a Jack Smith reckoning," The Washington Times, May 16, 2026.
- "Senator Schmitt Chairs Senate Judiciary Hearing on Arctic Frost, Reveals New Bombshell Documents Exposing Biden Administration's Political Weaponization of Justice Department," Senator Eric Schmitt press release, April 21, 2026.
- Chuck Grassley, "Grassley Releases New Arctic Frost Records, Raising Additional Questions about Jack Smith's Conduct and Candor," U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, March 24, 2026.
- Chuck Grassley, "Grassley Demands Answers from Telecom Companies Who Turned Congressional Phone Records Over to Jack Smith," U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, February 10, 2026.
- Lindsey Graham, "Graham: Watergate-Style Investigation Needed for Jack Smith, Judge Boasberg's Constitutional Abuses," Senator Lindsey Graham press release, October 31, 2025.
