By Douglas V. Gibbs
The Jack Smith documents reveal something more than the emergence of some rogue prosecutor. The whole scenario sheds light on the fact that a big government machine exists, and it’s been there since the beginning. It is, and it has been, a permanent machine that transcends political parties, and the people it has used as tools along the way. It’s a case that reveals that for the establishment, the Constitution is an obstacle rather than a boundary.
When a prosecutor names a target, the subpoenas are supposed to follow the target. That’s the promise of a criminal investigation: narrow, focused, aimed. What the documents released over the past several weeks actually show is something else entirely. The stated target was one man. The catch was the entire opposition ecosystem around him: members of Congress, thousands of small-dollar donors, journalists, campaign advisers, and the president’s own defense lawyers.
That gap between the stated target and the actual reach is the whole story. Everything else is evidence of it.
Start with the paper. A retired Justice Department Inspector General’s special agent, Brian Burnett, testified to House Judiciary investigators that while serving subpoenas in the probe code-named Arctic Frost, he was handed phone numbers, and was never told whose they were. One of them belonged to then-Ranking Member Jim Jordan. “I would’ve subpoenaed the number, but I did not know who the phone number belonged to,” Burnett said. He says he learned the truth only after retiring, from the news.
A Jack Smith team prosecutor, Timothy “Tad” Duree, testified that the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section did know the subscriber’s identity and approved targeting Jordan’s records back in April 2022. Burnett called the whole arrangement unusual in thirty years of law enforcement. It was not normal for prosecutors to be directing the steps agents normally handle themselves.
Then came the scope. According to a Senate Judiciary Committee report released by Chairman Chuck Grassley, Smith’s operation reached into the phone records of sixteen Republican members of Congress, which the report argues violated the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, a provision shielding representatives from executive-branch and legal system questioning over their legislative work.
It reached the donors. The committee says the probe swept up the financial records of small-dollar supporters in all fifty states. People who gave as little as one dollar. It included some 4,782 personal checks, spanning September 2019 to August 2023.
It reached the press. By one tally, communications from roughly fifty journalists across outlets from the Associated Press to The Wall Street Journal.
And it reached the defense. Newly declassified memos released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force show Smith’s team used a pen register (a device that logs calls without recording them) on the phone of Susie Wiles, tracking her contacts with more than twenty lawyers and at least five journalists.
Sen. Ted Cruz put the sum on the record: 197 subpoenas, 34 individuals, 163 businesses, records on at least 430 Republican individuals and entities. “If you look at the list,” he said, “there is one thing that is consistent. Every name on it is a Republican.”
One source of confusion worth clearing up: there were two probes, not one, and they are distinct.
Arctic Frost was the 2020 election and January 6 investigation. Plasmic Echo was the classified documents matter out of Mar-a-Lago. Smith inherited machinery that predated him. The Plasmic Echo approval was signed in March 2022, months before his appointment.
That matters, because it tells you Smith didn’t invent the machine. He inherited it, drove it, and expanded its reach.
Measured against the Constitution rather than party, several hooks stand out. The Appointments Clause, because a federal judge ruled Smith was never constitutionally appointed. The office required Senate confirmation he never received, and on that basis the Mar-a-Lago case was dismissed. The Speech or Debate Clause, because sixteen legislators had their records pulled. The First Amendment, because tracking donations, press calls, and political endorsements chills political activity. And the Fourth Amendment, though that one is the weakest of the four. Grand jury subpoenas are supposed to be broad.
Which is exactly the government’s defense: it was all “technically” lawful.
And it may well have been.
But “lawful” is not the point
Here is where motive enters, and motive is not a soft consideration. It is the only thing that explains why this target, why this date, and why this scope.
Think of siblings pestering each other. The rule is simple: don’t touch your sibling. So the clever one learns to irritate without touching – a foot hovered over the line, a hand never quite landing. The rule was technically obeyed. The pestering continued anyway.
That is the government’s argument. And technically, they may be right. But the physicality was never the point. The irritation was.
Apply that here. Lawful procedure in service of an unlawful purpose is still a problem. A subpoena can be perfectly legal and still be weaponized. The question is why it was issued, why then, and why that breadth. Look at the timing of the indictments, the range of the dates on the subpoenas, extending years before and after January 6, and ask yourself what an investigation focused narrowly on one day would have needed. Then ask what an investigation designed to map an entire political coalition would have needed.
I believe the answer is the latter.
This is why the “No Kings” shirt matters more than it should.
After testifying under oath that he was a nonpartisan prosecutor, that he’d “conduct it the same way whether it were Republican or a Democrat,” Jack Smith was photographed days later at a political festival wearing a “No Kings” t-shirt.
The lazy version of this argument is “shirt proves he’s a Democrat.” Any prosecutor can be a Democrat. The sharper version is this: “No Kings” is not a generic partisan label. It is the specific brand of the anti-Trump resistance. The shirt isn’t evidence that Smith has opinions. It’s evidence that he enlisted.
Lady Justice wears a blindfold for a reason. A prosecutor calling balls and strikes shouldn’t be wearing the team jersey, especially after swearing under oath that he has no team. The shirt is a small thing. But it is a confession.
We must be honest, however, and understand that none of this began with Smith.
In 2004, a forged document aired on 60 Minutes in a story about George W. Bush’s National Guard service, and Dan Rather lost his job when it collapsed. In 2016, the machinery grew teeth: a fabricated narrative. The Steele dossier. The Alfa Bank story. It was all laundered through the FBI and CIA and became a federal operation with surveillance warrants, leaks, and a special counsel. By the time Smith arrived, the playbook was mature. He didn’t write it. He multiplied it.
The process is the punishment. The precedent is older and has been used by both-parties, other parties in history, and both sides of the political spectrum. In 2008, Senator Ted Stevens was prosecuted by the same Public Integrity Section that later approved the Jordan records. He was convicted weeks before his election, lost his seat by a hair, and then the conviction collapsed. Prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence. The reversal came too late to save his Senate seat.
The process was the punishment.
This is the core insight, and it explains the entire strategy: the left doesn’t need convictions. The accusations are enough. Plant the guilt in the voters’ minds, let the indictment do the political work, and a later acquittal or dismissal is a footnote no one reads. The lawfare isn’t designed to win trials. It’s designed to win elections.
So what is the machine actually defending? Follow the incentives. The permanent bureaucracy outlived the Federalist Party, the Whigs, and every administration that tried to dislodge it. Thomas Jefferson’s fight with the “midnight judges” was the template, and when the Federalist Party died, its grip simply relocated to the judiciary, the branch hardest to remove them from. The machine has no party skin. It has a trough, and everyone who drinks from it has an incentive to keep it full.
I believe Donald Trump is a stick in the spokes of that machine. He is the greatest threat to it since Reagan. It’s not about any single policy. The machine’s existence, feeding the leviathan and keeping it strong, is why the full weight of the apparatus came down on Trump. Smith, Brennan, the Obama and Biden Justice Departments; they aren’t the machine. They’re willing participants in it, and willing to fight to keep it fed.
If the process is the punishment, the fix is to put a check on the process. That means narrowing prosecutorial immunity, so prosecutors pursuing public figures answer to more than themselves. It means independent review before a politician is indicted. Perhaps a “citizens’ accountability council,” as former Rep. Rick Renzi has proposed, or the “sunlight” review that followed the Stevens fiasco. It means an Inspector General that isn’t housed inside the very department it inspects.
Renzi, who fought Smith for seven and a half years, was indicted on 49 felonies, learned of it while delivering his own father’s eulogy, and was eventually pardoned, put it simply: “He uses the process to destroy you politically.”
He’s right. And the only way to stop a machine that weaponizes the process is to build a check into the process itself.
Smith is one man. The machine will outlive him. Unless we make it answer for what it did – and only then.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
Some sources:
Member of Jack Smith’s Team Comes Forward with New Information, Throws Smith Under the Bus – Trending Politics
Investigation into Jack Smith Suggests He Was the Real Threat to Democracy – Daily Caller
The Jack Smith Operation Shows Lawfare Will Only Get Worse – The Federalist
Jack Smith Just Proved He Lied to Congress – PJ Media
Jack Smith team tracked Trump defense lawyers’ calls by monitoring his chief of staff’s phone – Just the News
Jack Smith team secretly met ex-CIA chief John Brennan in 2023, but FBI agents left notes blank – Just the News
