Senate Republicans used Todd Blanche’s attorney general confirmation hearing on Wednesday to amplify the fresh revelation that former special counsel Jack Smith’s team accessed text messages involving 44 members of Congress during its investigation into President Donald Trump.“Did Jack Smith read my emails?” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asked Blanche, who is serving as acting attorney general.“I’m not sure, senator. I don’t know,” Blanche replied.
Kennedy pressed Blanche to determine whether Smith obtained his emails, how they were obtained, what communications involving Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) were collected, and whether they were shared with former Attorney General Merrick Garland, the former Justice Department head under the Biden administration who appointed Smith to handle two federal prosecutions involving Trump.“There are checks in place that should make it extraordinarily difficult for a prosecutor to collect and review a senator’s emails,” Blanche said, adding that those safeguards “should always be used.” When Kennedy said Smith “just ignored them,” Blanche, who represented Trump during Smith’s criminal cases against the then-former president, responded that he could not speak for the former special counsel.The exchange followed Grassley’s Tuesday disclosure that Smith’s office obtained White House text messages involving 44 lawmakers, including 20 senators, as part of a subpoena to the National Archives for records from the final months of Trump’s first term.Grassley said Smith’s team bypassed a filter process intended to identify potentially privileged congressional communications before investigators reviewed the records. He said the Trump DOJ acknowledged in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the special counsel’s investigative team “apparently bypassed the filter team and directly accessed these text messages.”The Iowa Republican argued the records included material covered by the Constitution’s speech-or-debate protections, including communications relating to legislation, resolutions, and investigative work. He called Smith’s operation a “runaway political train” and asked Blanche what the DOJ had done to ensure similar conduct did not recur.“The biggest thing we can do … is be transparent about what happened,” Blanche said, pledging to provide records to Congress and disclose prior department misconduct.Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) broadened the attack, asking Blanche to confirm that Garland, then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and then-FBI Director Christopher Wray personally approved the opening of Operation Arctic Frost. Blanche said they did.
