Chuck Grassley Put Jack Smith on Trial for Doing His Job

By Rachel Hurley September 29th, 2026

Chuck Grassley’s big scandal is that the guy investigating the coup… investigated.

That’s what today’s Senate hearing was really about. You’d never know it from the name Grassley gave it, though. He called it “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters.” They put the verdict first and the hearing second. Nobody even pretended this was about finding facts.

So let’s talk about what the probe was actually about.

Arctic Frost was the FBI case into the plan to overturn the 2020 election. That covers the fake electors, the pressure campaign, and Jan. 6th. Smith took it over when he became special counsel in 2022. The alleged plot ran out of the White House.

Grassley wants you shocked that Smith went after White House phones. His team subpoenaed the National Archives for texts tied to 87 of them. Where else did Grassley think the evidence of a White House plot would be?

Now Grassley’s making a huge fuss over nearly 50 reporters whose texts got swept up. They were from Fox, CNN, CBS, Reuters, and a bunch of other outlets. None of them were targets, though. Nobody subpoenaed a newsroom.

Smith asked for the gov’t’s own records. The reporters were in there cause Trump officials were texting the press on gov’t phones. Grassley’s office knows the reporters’ names, and it says it won’t release them. So we don’t know what those texts say, but we know how they got there.

The lesson is pretty simple. If you don’t want it in the record, don’t put it on a phone the gov’t owns.

It’s the same deal with the 44 current and former members of Congress. They’re from both parties. Their texts showed up because they were talking to people in the Trump White House. In a conspiracy case, you map who talked to who, and that’s basically the whole job.

I’ll be fair about one thing. The DOJ says Smith’s team “apparently bypassed” the filter team on those texts. A filter team is a separate group of lawyers who’s supposed to pull out protected stuff before investigators see it. That’s a real question, and I haven’t seen Smith answer it head-on.

It’s still not the perjury case Republicans are selling. Back in December, Smith was asked if the phone records he got from members of Congress included the content of their texts. He said no. Those were toll records, and toll records only show who called who and when. The texts came from somewhere else entirely - White House phones, through the National Archives.

Then there are the 4,782 checks Grassley keeps waving around. They came from people who gave mostly small amounts to Trump and groups tied to him between 2019 and 2023. The checks show home addresses, bank numbers, and signatures. Grassley wants you clutching your pearls over it.

Grassley told Smith there was “no legitimate basis” for any of it. Smith said yes, his team got financial info, cause he had a duty to collect the facts. Following the money is a normal thing to do in a big conspiracy case. The FBI keeping those records isn’t a scandal either, since keeping records is what evidence is.

I’ll give Grassley this much. He posted redacted copies of all the checks. But almost everything he’s got came to him through whistleblowers, and that means he picks what goes public. We got the checks, and we didn’t get the reporters’ names.

Meanwhile, Jim Jordan wouldn’t give Smith a public hearing at first. Smith offered to testify in public, and Jordan made him sit for a closed-door deposition instead. Then in July, Jordan referred Smith to the DOJ for prosecution over that same toll records answer. He says Smith misled Congress.

Jordan sent that referral to Todd Blanche. You know, the guy who used to be Trump’s defense lawyer? So the guy deciding whether to prosecute the prosecutor is the president’s old lawyer. The DOJ already said it’ll investigate.

Republicans don’t wanna talk about that part.

Smith didn’t flinch, though. He told them, “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation.” He also said he’d bring the same case again today, “regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”

So what’s the actual scandal? A special counsel says he found proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and he brought the charges. Those cases got tossed after Trump won in 2024, so no jury ever heard them. Now Congress is holding hearings with titles that read like convictions, cause the investigator had the nerve to investigate.

Make it make sense.

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Chuck Grassley Put Jack Smith on Trial for Doing His Job

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