Republican-controlled committee refers former Trump prosecutor Jack Smith for criminal investigation

Former justice department special counsel Jack Smith testifies at a House oversight hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on 22 January 2026. Photograph: Bonnie Cash/UPI/Shutterstock View image in fullscreen Former justice department special counsel Jack Smith testifies at a House oversight hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on 22 January 2026. Photograph: Bonnie Cash/UPI/Shutterstock Republican-controlled committee refers former Trump prosecutor Jack Smith for criminal investigation Committee accused of trying to ‘weaponize’ justice system via ‘laughably weak and vindictive criminal referral’ Democrats have accused the US House of Representatives judiciary committee of a “baseless” and “vindictive” attack on former special prosecutor Jack Smith after it referred him for criminal prosecution for allegedly lying to Congress over his investigation into Donald Trump ’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Committee chair Jim Jordan , an Ohio Republican, wrote to acting US attorney general Todd Blanche on Wednesday night, asserting Smith “made willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact” during testimony about obtaining phone records of a number of Republican lawmakers. Smith, Jordan claimed in the letter, falsely told the panel that his team had no access to privileged text messages when he testified in December that they had only “toll records” containing numbers, not content. US justice department documents presented to the panel on 14 July, Jordan said, showed that Smith’s investigators actually had access to the text messages of 44 members of Congress. “Based on this new information, there is cause for investigation to determine whether Mr Smith knowingly made false statements to obstruct the Committee’s oversight,” Jordan wrote. Smith’s lawyers Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski, in their own letter to Blanche , said their client “provided truthful, responsive answers” during closed-doors questioning by the panel in December, and again during an open session in January. “This referral reflects a chilling eagerness to weaponize the justice system by attacking a career, nonpartisan public servant who faithfully and fearlessly performed his duties by following the facts and the law,” they wrote. “Mr Smith agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee fully cognizant of the risk that President Trump’s Justice Department would try to find something in his testimony to serve as the basis for a criminal charge. “This risk existed not because Mr Smith would make a false statement, but because President Trump has repeatedly ordered that Mr Smith be prosecuted and jailed.” Democratic members of the judiciary committee, meanwhile, called Jordan’s letter “a laughably weak and vindictive criminal referral” pandering to Trump’s frequent demands for retribution against the special prosecutor who investigated him. Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, the panel’s ranking member, issued a lengthy statement saying Smith gave “clear and