Former special counsel Jack Smith sought more than two years’ worth of phone records for now-FBI Director Kash Patel while Smith was investigating President Donald Trump, according to a tranche of documents released Tuesday by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
Two subpoenas showed Smith’s team asked Verizon for Patel’s phone records dating from October 2020 through February 2023. Patel first announced the subpoenas' existence in February, calling them "outrageous and deeply alarming" at the time.
Patel worked in the first Trump administration from 2019 through January 2021, before becoming an outspoken pro-Trump firebrand as a private citizen, meaning the subpoenas stretched back into his time as a government official.
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The subpoenas were accompanied by one-year, court-authorized gag orders, meaning Verizon was ordered by the court not to alert Patel of their existence. It is common for prosecutors to subpoena phone records, also known as toll records, as part of investigations. The records would not include contents of messages but would show with whom Patel communicated and when.
Grassley released the documents ahead of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing examining Arctic Frost, the FBI investigation that led to Smith prosecuting Trump over the 2020 election. Patel was also a known witness in a separate FBI probe into Trump’s handling of classified documents, and it is unclear which of the investigations the subpoenas pertained to.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, voiced at the start of the hearing what many Republicans have said about the Biden DOJ’s efforts to investigate Trump, noting how the expansive probes targeted hundreds of Republican individuals and entities.
"If Watergate taught us anything, it is that even a single abuse of power carried out by a handful of individuals can shake the foundations of our republic," Cruz said. "But what we confront today, the Biden administration's Arctic Frost scheme is not a single act. It is a modern Watergate, trading a break-in at one office for a digital sweep into approximately 100,000 private communications. More than a dozen senators and thousands of individuals lives."
Smith, who became special counsel in November 2022 and resigned when Trump took office, has since appeared before Congress for public and closed-door testimony and repeatedly defended his work as by-the-book and apolitical.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., noted during the hearing that Patel testified to a grand jury as part of the classified documents investigation and that it was "obvious" why Smith was interested in Patel.
"Patel made himself a fact witness in that investigation," Whitehouse said. "He went on podcasts bragging about how he planned to post classified information online at Donald Trump's direction, and how he'd personally witnessed Donald Trump declassify records."
The new documents released by Grassley also included briefing materials Smith's team prepared for Attorney General Merrick Garland that noted the FBI's investigative work was "going well," that meetings were happening among top FBI and DOJ officials and D.C. federal judges and that Smith was relying on the Democrat-led Jan. 6 Committee's work to help with his investigation.
Fox News Digital reached out to the FBI for comment.
