Jack Smith spent two years hunting Donald Trump with a federal badge and a blank check.
Now one of his key partners just got caught lying to Congress about what it did to help him.
And Chuck Grassley has the documents to prove it.
The Arctic Frost Subpoena Verizon Told Congress Did Not Exist
On May 25, 2023, Jack Smith's Arctic Frost team issued a grand jury subpoena to Verizon – seeking phone records of senators connected to the January 6 investigation.
Verizon complied.
Months later, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley sent Verizon a formal request to identify every Justice Department demand for Senate-related phone records going back to 2016.
Verizon's answer: nothing to produce before October 2019.
The May 2023 Arctic Frost subpoena – the one Verizon had already satisfied – was nowhere in the response.
Verizon sat on this information for two years before finally surfacing in 2025 with an explanation: "human error."
Grassley isn't buying it.
In a letter this week to Verizon CEO Daniel Schulman, Grassley and 15 colleagues demanded that Schulman explain when he personally learned of the subpoena, who inside Verizon was informed, and what "human error" actually means in practice – because a clerical mistake doesn't erase a two-year paper trail involving sitting United States senators.
"As part of our investigation, we need to fully understand what Verizon knew about Smith's subpoenas, when they became aware members were impacted and why the company didn't inform members like they were supposed to," Grassley told Fox News Digital.
The senators signing the letter aren't just investigators – they're targets.
Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Rick Scott of Florida, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri, John Cornyn of Texas, and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi all had their own toll records swept up by Smith.
Chuck Grassley himself – the chairman now running the investigation – had his records grabbed too.
How Obama Judge James Boasberg Helped Jack Smith Bury the Evidence
The subpoena didn't appear and disappear on its own.
Both subpoenas came with year-long gag orders courtesy of Obama-appointed D.C. federal Judge James Boasberg – the same judge who has spent the Trump administration fighting Trump on immigration – forbidding Verizon and AT&T from telling anyone that senators' records had been seized.
AT&T resisted Smith's demands.
Verizon did not.
Complying with a subpoena and hiding one from Congress are two very different things – and Verizon's silence didn't end when the gag order did.
Grassley's letter demands Verizon hand over two years of internal communications – May 2023 through October 2025 – proving whether executives ever acknowledged a duty to warn the senators whose records Smith had seized.
Grassley's team has already documented that Smith was warned subpoenaing congressional communications could violate the Speech or Debate Clause – the constitutional provision that forbids the executive branch from using the courts to surveil or intimidate lawmakers doing their jobs.
Smith proceeded anyway.
Jack Smith Read 44 Lawmakers Text Messages While Running His Witch Hunt
Verizon is just where Grassley is standing right now.
Arctic Frost swept up records from more than 400 Republican targets – senators, House members, conservative organizations, and private citizens, including the late Charlie Kirk.
Toll records show who a senator was calling during the most politically sensitive weeks of 2020 and early 2021 – advisors, colleagues, lawyers, donors – and when, for how long, and from which cell tower.
That's a roadmap to every private relationship a Republican lawmaker had while the left was building its case against Trump.
And Smith's team didn't stop at metadata.
In July 2026, Senate Republicans released documents showing Smith's team had read the private text messages of 44 sitting and former members of Congress – 40 Republicans and 4 Democrats – without running them past the internal safeguards meant to keep prosecutors away from protected material.
That is a prosecutor reading senators' private texts while those same senators had the constitutional power to investigate him.
The House has already issued a criminal referral against Smith.
Former DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz warned in a 2025 report that subpoenaing congressional records "risks chilling Congress's ability to conduct oversight of the executive branch."
Garland, Christopher Wray, and Lisa Monaco signed off on Arctic Frost.
Grassley has been peeling this back one disclosure at a time – and Verizon is sitting on one of the biggest ones left.
The August 13 deadline isn't a courtesy – it's a countdown.
If one of the country's largest phone carriers can't explain in two weeks how a federal grand jury subpoena targeting U.S. senators vanished from its own files for over two years, the Senate Judiciary Committee will have to decide whether "human error" was really a decision.
Sources:
- Charles Creitz, "Jack Smith's Senate Phone Records Probe Turns to Verizon's Handling of Subpoenas," Fox News, July 31, 2026.
- Staff, "Grassley Presses Verizon on Failure to Disclose Arctic Frost Subpoenas to Congress," Just the News, August 1, 2026.
- Senate Judiciary Committee, "Arctic Frost Accountability: Oversight of Telecommunications Carriers' Responses to Jack Smith's Witch Hunt," judiciary.senate.gov, February 10, 2026.
- Staff, "Biden DOJ Subpoenaed Jim Jordan's Phone Records Covering More Than Two Years," Fox News, November 20, 2025.
