Former special counsel Jack Smith's investigators blew past the Justice Department's own privilege safeguards to directly access text messages between Trump White House officials and 44 members of Congress - then had the FBI match the phone numbers to lawmakers' names, according to DOJ records released Tuesday.

Assistant Attorney General Patrick Davis told Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) in a letter accompanying the records that Smith's team "bypassed the Filter Team and directly accessed these text messages." The FBI then worked out which senators and House members had sent or received them, Davis wrote.

The filter unit existed for one purpose: to screen messages pulled from the National Archives for privileged material before line investigators ever laid eyes on them.

"All communication to/from the Filter Team must go through the Coordinator," one internal protocol document states - adding that nothing was to reach the investigative team without a filter attorney's sign-off.

The messages, sent between October 2020 and Jan. 20, 2021, ran between a bipartisan roster of lawmakers and Trump White House figures including chief of staff Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Ivanka Trump, Stephen Miller, Peter Navarro, now-CIA Director John Ratcliffe and now-FBI Director Kash Patel, the records show.

Among the 44 lawmakers: Grassley himself, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.); House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.); Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.); Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Armed Services Committee; then-Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), now mayor of Los Angeles; and then-Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), now head of the EPA.

An internal DOJ email dated Aug. 21, 2023, shows Smith's team discussing "54 excel files with text messages from White House phones" being loaded into a shared drive - material gathered under the codenames "Project Coconut," the election-interference probe, and "Project Cranberry," the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

"Jack Smith's criminal investigation of President Trump was a runaway train that had no brakes," Grassley said Tuesday, charging that investigators reviewed messages from dozens of lawmakers "outside the scope of the government's investigation" - and that Smith's team "ran roughshod over the Constitution even after repeated warnings."

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) called the disclosure "yet another grotesque example" of the Biden-era Justice Department's weaponization, saying no one should be shocked by Smith's "recklessness and blatant abuse of power."

'Just toll records'

The records land squarely on testimony Smith gave under oath seven months ago.

At his Dec. 17 deposition before the House Judiciary Committee, Smith repeatedly assured lawmakers that his office's reach into Congress stopped at "toll records" - bare logs of who called whom, and when.

"Did you seek a search warrant for the content of any text messages from Members?" a committee lawyer asked.

"No, I don't recall that," Smith answered.

"It was just toll records?"

"Correct."

Asked separately whether the toll records his office obtained from members of Congress included "the content of text messages," Smith answered flatly: "No."

Strictly speaking, those questions concerned records sought directly from lawmakers and their phone carriers - not the White House data Smith's office already held. But nowhere in the 255-page deposition did Smith volunteer that his investigators possessed - and, per the Davis letter, had directly accessed - the actual contents of members' messages, harvested from the other side of the conversation. The committee, unaware of the National Archives trove, never asked.

A review of the transcript also found Smith sharpened his sworn answers after the fact. In an errata sheet correcting the record, Smith revised his response on whether any other lawmaker's phone had been seized from "I don't know" to a definitive "I don't -- no." Another correction strikes the word "text" from his reference to "text records" that could prove certain Jan. 6 calls happened - leaving just "records."

Either way, the 'perjury' word is being tossed around now...

Roughly 30 pages of the transcript released by the committee - including the page carrying Smith's "just toll records" exchange - were inserted as images rather than searchable text, meaning keyword searches of the document skip past them. The committee did not respond to questions about the formatting.

Months of warnings

Tuesday's release caps a months-long drip of Arctic Frost disclosures: 197 subpoenas touching more than 430 Republican individuals and groups; toll records for at least 11 senators and six House members, all shielded by court-approved gag orders; and internal emails showing prosecutors were warned that congressional subpoenas could violate the Constitution's Speech or Debate Clause.

In one email released this spring, a member of Smith's team wrote that the office was about to "fire off subpoenas for so many members tolls" that Smith himself should be looped in first.

Smith has insisted the phone-records furor is overblown. "Recent narratives about my team's work are false and misleading," he told the committee in his opening statement, stressing that toll records "do not include the content of calls." His attorneys have previously called the collection lawful - noting that special counsel Robert Hur obtained President Biden's toll records, and that the Justice Department under Trump's first term seized phone records of Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, along with those of dozens of congressional staffers.

"Jack Smith has answering to do," Grassley said, vowing to haul the former special counsel before the Senate Judiciary Committee "in the coming months."