Republicans’ Criminal Referral of Jack Smith Exposed as Total Nonsense

House Republicans are trying to file criminal charges against former special counsel Jack Smith.

Representative Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a criminal referral for Smith to the Department of Justice Wednesday, urging the department to investigate Smith for making false statements to Congress during congressional testimony in December.

At issue is a line of questioning in which Smith was asked whether he sought a search warrant for the content of text messages from members of Congress, to which Smith replied that he did not. Last week, Senator Chuck Grassley posted on X that he had “received records [from] DOJ confirming Jack Smith’s investigative team reviewed the contents of text msgs sent by 44 MEMBERS OF CONGRESS.”

But Grassley’s post and the questions Smith was asked were two different categories of documents, as legal experts such as Lawfare’s Anna Bower and Politico’s Kyle Cheney pointed out on X. Smith requested information from Congress on toll records, which concerned the time and date of text messages, not their content.

There was a separate instance in which Smith’s team gathered text messages from the National Archives from White House phones. Some of those records included exchanges with members of Congress. But Republicans never asked about that.

“[T]here’s zero ambiguity here,” Bower said. “Nothing in the Grassley docs raises any real question of perjury.”

House Democrats quickly responded to Jordan’s letter Wednesday. Representative Jamie Raskin called Jordan’s letter a “baseless and vindictive criminal referral” that “deliberately distorts and misstates the facts, including what questions the Republicans actually asked at Mr. Smith’s interview.”

Smith’s lawyers have also responded to Jordan’s letter with one of their own, saying his accusations are based on a “spurious claim.”

“The referral is made not because Mr. Smith made a false statement, which the letter concedes, but because he did not proactively disclose information that was not responsive to a question asked,” Smith’s lawyers wrote. “During his testimony, Mr. Smith provided truthful, responsive answers and candidly discussed his work.” ...