Jack Smith Secretly Subpoenaed Patel's Phone Records — Sweeping Grab Triggers New Perjury Heat

In this video, we break down the Senate Intelligence Committee Worldwide Threats Hearing where Senator Mark Warner questioned FBI Director Kash Patel about FISA Section 702 surveillance and its reauthorization. Warner confronted Patel with his own past statements criticizing warrantless surveillance of Americans and asked why he now supports a clean 18-month extension of the program without a warrant requirement. The exchange focused on civil liberties, surveillance oversight, improper FBI queries, and the upcoming congressional vote that will determine the future of the program. Watch the full breakdown of this major Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, the Section 702 debate, and what this could mean for surveillance policy and civil liberties in the United States.

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Three days ago, Chuck Grassley walked into the Senate Judiciary Committee chamber carrying two subpoenas. Not documents describing subpoenas. Not congressional testimony referencing subpoenas. The actual subpoenas themselves, issued in November 2022 and February 2023, both signed by federal judges, both directed to Verizon, both seeking toll records for one specific person: Kash Patel, the man who is now the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The first subpoena requested records from January 1st, 2021 through the date of issuance in November 2022. The second requested records from October 1st, 2020 through February 22nd, 2023. Combined, they cover two years and four months of every phone call Patel made or received, every text message sent or received, his mailing addresses, his residential addresses, his email addresses, and the names attached to every number in his records. Both were accompanied by nondisclosure orders signed by federal judges, meaning Verizon was legally prohibited from telling Patel his records were being collected. He did not know. And now the records of those subpoenas, placed on the table of the Senate Judiciary Committee three days ago at a hearing Grassley has named Arctic Frost: A Modern Watergate, are producing a new line of accountability that Democrats have been waiting for and that Republicans have been trying to prevent from reaching its logical conclusion. Because those subpoenas, legal and court-authorized and exactly what the Department of Justice's own investigative standards require, are the same subpoenas that Kash Patel called outrageous and deeply alarming in February. And the outrage he expressed when he described them is the same outrage that, within hours of his statement, he used to justify firing a dozen FBI agents. Including the agents who were in CI-12. The Iran counterintelligence unit. The one that was gutted four days before the United States went to war with Iran.

Watch this video until the very end because the sequence that Grassley's documents make visible is not just a political story about Jack Smith and his investigation. It is the documented chain of events by which the FBI director used the discovery of legal subpoenas, issued under court authorization as part of a federal criminal investigation in which he was a known witness, as justification for retaliatory firings that damaged the national security of the United States. And if you are new here, subscribe right now and turn on notifications because the Senate Judiciary hearing that released these documents also produced a specific claim from Grassley about perjury that the Department of Justice will have to decide whether to investigate.

Let me give you the full sequence because the sequence is everything. In 2022, Kash Patel was a private citizen who had worked in the first Trump administration and had become one of Trump's most prominent public defenders. He had appeared on podcasts describing how he had witnessed Trump declassify documents. He had made himself, in the words of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse at Tuesday's hearing, a fact witness in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents investigation by publicly bragging about his role in events that were under criminal scrutiny. He had testified before a federal grand jury in 2022 as part of that investigation and had been given limited immunity from criminal prosecution in exchange for that testimony. In other words, he was exactly the kind of person whose phone records a federal special counsel investigating the events of January 6th and the classified documents retention would seek to examine through the standard grand jury investigative process. Toll records in this context are not surveillance. They are call logs. Who called whom, when, and for how long. Not the content of conversations. The log. The same kind of record that defense attorneys subpoena in conspiracy cases, the same kind of record that has been used in federal investigations spanning nine presidential administrations. Smith's team subpoenaed Patel's Verizon records twice. Federal judges signed the nondisclosure orders both times. That is not an irregular process. That is the normal operation of federal investigative authority under congressional statute.

On February 25th, 2026, Reuters reported that the FBI had subpoenaed Patel's toll records as a private citizen during the Biden administration. Patel immediately issued a public statement. He called it outrageous and deeply alarming. He described the subpoenas as secretly obtained using flimsy pretexts, buried in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight. The specific phrase flimsy pretexts is the one that the documents released Tuesday directly contradict, because those documents show that Smith's team had specific, documented, publicly established reasons to seek Patel's records. He had testified before a grand jury. He had made himself, as Whitehouse put it at Tuesday's hearing, a fact witness by going on podcasts and describing classified information he had personally handled. The pretexts were not flimsy. They were Patel's own public statements. Within hours of his February 25th outrage statement, the FBI began firing people. A dozen agents and support staff were terminated over two days. Every one of them had worked on the classified documents investigation. Many were from CI-12. That is the documented timeline. The outrage statement came first. The firings came second. The CI-12 gutting followed. And four days after CI-12 was gutted, the United States went to war with Iran.

Now Grassley has released the actual subpoenas. And Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said something at Tuesday's hearing that produced the clip that has been spreading since the session ended. He said: Patel made himself a fact witness. He went on podcasts bragging about how he planned to post classified information online at Donald Trump's direction, and how he'd personally witnessed Donald Trump declassify records. It was obvious why Smith was interested in him. He was a witness in the investigation. And now he is the director of the FBI. And the people he fired for their role in the investigation he was a witness in are suing for their jobs back.

If you are still watching, hit the like button right now. Drop a comment below. Because Whitehouse just identified the constitutional structure that makes this entire sequence not just politically problematic but potentially legally problematic for Patel. He was a witness. The people he fired were investigating the case in which he was a witness. That is not just a political observation. That is the outline of a retaliatory firing claim that the FBI Agents Association has already filed in federal court, and that Whitehouse was saying out loud in a Senate hearing to ensure it is in the congressional record. Comment below: if a witness in a federal investigation fires the investigators after becoming their boss, what is the legal term for that?

The Grassley documents released Tuesday added specific detail to the Smith subpoena picture that changed the political and legal landscape. The first subpoena was issued November 23rd, 2022. The second was issued February 22nd, 2023. Between those two dates, Patel was a private citizen, outside government, actively working to defend Trump's interests publicly. The time window covered by the combined subpoenas stretches from October 2020, before the 2020 election, through February 2023, more than two years after Trump left office. That scope is significant because it includes Patel's communications during the transition period, the post-election period, and the period during which Trump's classified documents retention became the subject of federal investigation. The broader Arctic Frost investigation generated at least 84 subpoenas to Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile alone, covering more than 400 Republican individuals and organizations. Ten of those subpoenas requested tolling records for twenty current or former Republican members of Congress. Grassley had previously released 197 subpoenas targeting those organizations and individuals in a December 2025 release. The documents released Tuesday added the two Patel subpoenas and the internal emails that described the 14-member Congress wish list. A January 2023 internal email from Smith's team, also released by Grassley, described plans to subpoena toll records for fourteen members of Congress, noting that some of those members already had communications, including text messages, with individuals associated with President Trump. The email said: before we tell Main, as in main Justice, we're going to fire off subpoenas for so many members tolls I should make sure Jack's aware. Grassley read that email aloud in the hearing chamber. He described it as evidence that Smith misled Congress and the public about the scope of his investigation. He described the overall investigative approach as a modern Watergate.

Former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani, interviewed by Newsweek after the hearing, offered a description of the subpoenas that directly addresses the outrageous framing. He said: it doesn't include the content. You need a search warrant and a wire tap for that. But the call logs, the metadata, that is something that is commonly subpoenaed in any type of conspiracy case, because obviously a conspiracy is an unlawful agreement between people, and how do you prove an agreement? Through communications. Rahmani said it was unsurprising that Smith would have been searching for those records given Patel's public statements about his role in the relevant events. That expert assessment directly contradicts Patel's characterization of the subpoenas as using flimsy pretexts. They were not flimsy pretexts. Patel had publicly identified himself as a witness to the events under investigation. That is exactly the situation in which investigators subpoena toll records. The pretexts were not flimsy. They were Patel's own podcasts.

The perjury dimension emerged from Grassley's opening statement. He said that the documents his committee is releasing show Jack Smith misled Congress and the public, if not outright lied. That language is significant for a specific reason. Smith testified before the House Judiciary Committee in January 2026. At that hearing, Democratic members pressed him on whether his investigation had relied heavily on the House January 6th Committee's report. Smith said in his written Special Counsel Report that the committee's materials comprised a small part of the Office's investigative record. But an internal Smith team record released Tuesday says of the January 6th committee report: Leadership team fully read and reviewed. The committee's January 6th Report gets referenced internally as something Smith's team went over page by page, and incorporated into our investigative plan. Those two descriptions are not compatible. One says it was a small part of the record. The other says leadership fully read it, went through it page by page, and incorporated it into the investigative plan. If Smith testified to Congress that committee materials were a small part of the record while his own internal documents describe leadership incorporating it page by page into the plan, Grassley wants the Department of Justice to evaluate whether that constitutes perjury.

Whether the Department of Justice, which is now run by Pam Bondi and advised by Trump loyalists including Patel himself through the FBI's cooperative relationship with DOJ, will pursue a perjury referral against the man who prosecuted Trump is a political question that has an obvious answer. But the documents are in the congressional record now. The subpoenas are public. The internal Smith team emails are public. The scope of the toll record subpoenas covering Patel, Susie Wiles, fourteen members of Congress, and more than four hundred Republican individuals and organizations, is documented. And the timeline between Patel discovering those legal subpoenas and firing the agents who worked on the investigation is documented. What remains is the accountability question that Whitehouse put on the record Tuesday afternoon. Patel was a fact witness. The people he fired were investigating the case he was a witness in. The CI-12 agents he fired were also tracking Iran. The war started four days later. And the director of the FBI, sitting before the Senate Judiciary Committee chair who just released the subpoenas of his own phone records, has not explained any of it. Subscribe right now because the Senate Judiciary hearings in this series continue and each one has produced new documents. Share this everywhere. Two subpoenas. Two years and four months of phone records. Nondisclosure orders from federal judges. And the FBI director who called them outrageous fired the investigators who worked on the case he witnessed before they could explain to a judge why the records mattered.