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Former special counsel Jack Smith sat for public testimony this week and what unfolded was less a sober accounting and more a defensive scramble to justify secretive tactics that smell of political targeting. Conservatives watched in outrage as explanations about subpoenas and gag orders fell flat when weighted against the Constitution.
Documents and testimony confirm Smith’s team quietly subpoenaed phone records tied to multiple Republican lawmakers and obtained court gag orders that kept carriers from notifying those lawmakers for months. This was not garden-variety discovery — it was secrecy wrapped in legalese designed to prevent immediate challenge or scrutiny. The Justice Department’s own norms were stretched thin in a way that should alarm every defender of separation of powers.
Smith told lawmakers the Public Integrity Section signed off on the subpoenas and insisted the D.C. court would not have realized the orders applied to members of Congress, a claim Republicans rightly called evasive. The notion that prosecutors can obscure the target of a subpoena from judges and from the very branch those targets serve is lawfare by another name. Americans deserve to know whether routine prosecutorial practice was weaponized into political surveillance.
Rep. Darrell Issa bluntly accused Smith of “spying” on the speaker of the House and other GOP lawmakers, and Fox’s legal analysts called Smith’s use of secret gag orders “out of control.” Those are strong words for strong violations — and they reflect a broader, justified fury that unelected prosecutors treated political opponents like crime suspects while hiding their tracks. This is not zeal; it is a dangerous overreach.
This episode underscores a long-standing problem: when the power of the federal government is concentrated in prosecutors willing to blur lines, the First Amendment and the Constitution’s checks and balances pay the price. The House is already demanding answers and telecom transparency about how those subpoenas were carried out, because accountability is the only antidote to bureaucratic tyranny. Americans should insist that no one in the DOJ be above scrutiny when they use secrecy against political opponents.
If judges authorized gag orders without clear disclosure that members of Congress were involved, that failure must be corrected and those responsible held to account — including through Congressional oversight and, if warranted, referrals to ethics or disciplinary bodies. Telecom companies and courts must not be complicit in turning investigative tools into partisan weapons. The rule of law cannot survive when it is selectively applied to one side and hidden from the other.
Hardworking Americans should take this as a wake-up call: defend institutions by demanding transparency, vote out officials who tolerate lawfare, and back leaders who restore equal justice under law. We do not cower when the system is used against us; we organize, investigate, and hold the powerful accountable so our liberties endure for the next generation.
