Congress

How Jack Smith connected the dots between GOP lawmakers, Trump aides in 2020 election probe

Published

6 months ago

March 24, 2026

Former special counsel Jack Smith’s office sought to map a vast web of contacts between President Donald Trump’s most vocal Republican allies in Congress and key players in his bid to subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to newly released records of the Smith-led investigation.

Emails from January 2023 circulated among Smith’s deputies show how top GOP lawmakers communicated directly with individuals later identified by Smith as Trump’s co-conspirators in his election interference plot, including attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.

Those contacts became the Smith office’s justification for pursuing subpoenas of phone logs for more than a dozen Republican officials. That includes former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — who were previously known to be of interest to Smith’s investigators — as well as then-Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York, who is now Trump’s head of the EPA and is among other lawmakers not previously known to be under Smith’s microscope.

A spokesperson for Zeldin did not immediately provide a response to a request for comment.

These Republicans and others are featured in the materials released Tuesday by Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley, who has been leading a probe into Smith’s work. The Iowa Republican made the documents public to help support the party’s widely held position that Smith was politically motivated in his pursuit of criminal charges against Trump during the Biden administration — for efforts to overturn the election and his mishandling of classified documents.

“They were not aiming low. They were trying to take out everyone on the other side,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), whose data Smith’s office sought to obtain via subpoena, said Tuesday.

Cruz delivered the remarks while presiding over a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing comparing Smith’s investigations into Trump to the Watergate scandal that took down former President Richard Nixon and led to new rules cracking down on government corruption.

But the newly public documents also offer a more expansive picture of who Smith’s team believed might have had information that could bolster their probe into the campaign to undermine the 2020 election results that culminated in a deadly riot.

The special counsel’s office found that Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) had communicated with Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows and then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who is now director of the CIA. A spokesperson for Ratcliffe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Zeldin corresponded with Meadows and Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, who was a close Trump ally in the effort. Cruz had calls with Meadows, Eastman and Ratcliffe and was one of several senators who received a call from Giuliani on Jan. 6.

Those contacts explain Smith’s interest in obtaining subpoenas for the phone logs for a dozen current and former Republican members of Congress, which his team said would be used to “establish logical evidentiary inferences regarding Trump and his surrogates’ actions and intent.”

The list of potential subpoena targets also includes Arizona Republican Reps. Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar. Spokespeople for Biggs, Gosar and Perry did not immediately return a request for comment.

According to the documents, Smith’s team methodically reviewed information provided in a report produced by the Democratic-led House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks, suggesting a nexus between the two parallel inquiries.

New documents released by Grassley Tuesday also revealed the scale and scope of Smith’s scrutiny of Kash Patel, a longtime Trump ally who now serves as FBI director. Patel was previously established to have been a target of the special counsel’s investigation, but it was not known that Smith sought to obtain Patel’s phone and text message logs spanning two years.

A spokesperson for national FBI headquarters did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The materials also provide new details about the backchanneling between former Vice President Mike Pence and Smith’s team regarding Pence’s grand jury testimony, and the efforts investigators took to screen out privileged information before they accessed devices they seized from targets of their probe.

At the Judiciary subcommittee hearing Tuesday, Democrats continued to defend Smith’s work and urged Republicans to schedule a public hearing with the former special counsel.

“Apparently when the Trump DOJ does it, it’s nothing new; when Jack Smith does it, it’s a modern Watergate,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights. “With Patel, it’s obvious why Jack Smith was looking at him.”

Grassley has said Smith will receive an invitation to address the full Judiciary panel in the coming months, following testimony the attorney gave to the House Judiciary Committee late last year.

A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment.

Congress

College sports bill moves forward in Senate with Democratic support

Published

4 hours ago

September 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A group of Senate Democrats on Tuesday voted with most Republicans after months of painstaking negotiations to help advance a sweeping college athletics bill.

An initial procedural vote on the measure led by Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and ranking member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) moved forward on a 74-24 vote, despite opposition on both sides of the aisle. The move tees up more floor debate and a final passage vote before lawmakers leave to campaign for the midterms.

Cantwell said that even though the bill wasn’t perfect, it would help ensure the name, image and likeness rights of student athletes, among other protections.

“I will not let the perfect be the enemy of the essential,” Cantwell said on the floor ahead of the vote. “This is the last best chance to save college sports and put HBCUs at the table where the future gets decided,” she said, referring to historically Black colleges and universities.

The chamber is expected to stay for the entirety of its planned three-week session now that senators opened a path to take up the bill, according to four Senate aides granted anonymity to discuss planning. Fast-tracking the legislation would depend on a deal between all 100 senators, which would require overcoming holdouts’ opposition.

Supporters of the bill behind the scenes have been fielding concerns from senators and a coalition of sports, civil rights and labor groups who’ve criticized the measure’s planned regulation of the multibillion-dollar industry.

Democrats like Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) spent weeks trying to convince his colleagues to “step back and oppose” the bill in its current form, saying in a press conference with AFL-CIO this week it would “preserve a system of exploitation that is damaging our athletes.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who voted “no,” told reporters Tuesday the bill “falls way short.”

“It really jeopardizes college athletes’ health and safety. It gives broad-based antitrust exemption to the NCAA and gets very little back from it,” Booker added, referring to the National Collegiate Athletic Association. “It is a bill that really, unfortunately, as one of the handful of college football players in this place, it does not cure what are some of the biggest things that are really threatening college players.”

Some Democrats who supported the bill, including New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján, cited concerns from student athletes and coaches in their home states as the reason why.

“Student athletes and others wanted to make sure that the conferences that they were playing for were getting treated in a fair way,” he said. “Go talk to athletes from our schools and across the country and see what this means to them, not just athletes from the super conferences around America.”

The legislation has the backing of President Donald Trump, major sports conferences like the Big Ten and Southeastern, student sports organizations and HBCUs.

Several Republicans who were on the fence earlier about the bill, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), were convinced to support it after Cruz added language to clarify that it would not preempt state laws on transgender athletes’ participation on women’s sports teams.

Others Republicans like Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said he couldn’t support advancing the measure because “there’s too much government involvement in it.”

Congress

Rebel Democrats again help House GOP advance floor agenda

Published

4 hours ago

September 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A pair of House Democrats voted to advance a slate of GOP bills in a procedural vote that was otherwise on track to fail — the second time they have crossed party lines to help out House GOP leaders in recent weeks.

Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine previously aided Speaker Mike Johnson earlier this month when they voted to advance a “rule” resolution that teed up a Golden-authored measure aiding lobstermen. The move sparked outrage among many of their Democratic colleagues and created a touchy situation for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

But the dustup does not appear to have fazed Golden and Gluesenkamp Perez, who again joined with Republicans Tuesday to set up votes on bills that would hand President Donald Trump new authorities to sanction Russia’s trading partners as well as measures rolling back some EPA regulations.

The vote was 214-211, with two Republicans voting “no” — Reps. Andy Harris of Maryland and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. Several other Republicans, including Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania voted “yes” only after extended talks with House GOP leaders.

The last time House Republicans adopted a rule without help from Democrats was in July.

Speaker Mike Johnson, when asked about Democrats helping him adopt a rule twice this month, said he “would have gotten the votes.”

“You saw me work it there at the end,” Johnson said. “We would have had the votes necessary, but we had some discussion about other measures that people want to consider, so just worked through the process.”

After Gluesenkamp Perez and Golden voted with the GOP earlier this month, Jeffries promised a “serious response,” but he later indicted that there would be no public consequences following private conversations with the lawmakers. Golden is retiring after his term ends, and Gluesenkamp Perez is seeking reelection in a district won by Trump in 2024.

Harris announced before the vote that he was introducing a bill to tackle affordability by suspending the federal gas tax, suggesting he may have withheld his vote in a bid to secure floor consideration.

“Let’s put my bill on the floor and PASS IT,” Harris said in a post on X.

Congress

House panel recommends Leon Black be held in contempt for stonewalling Epstein investigation

Published

5 hours ago

September 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The House Oversight Committee voted unanimously 41-0 Tuesday to recommend billionaire investor Leon Black be held in contempt of Congress for not fully cooperating with the panel’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

It marks an escalation in an already contentious standoff, where Black defied two congressional subpoenas, refused to appear for a transcribed interview and then sued the committee for allegedly “overstep[ing] its authority.”

“Subpoenas are not suggestions. They carry the force of law and require full compliance,” said Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), later noting that Black gave the committee “no choice but to hold him in contempt” after ignoring the subpoenas.

Black has been a target of the committee’s Epstein probe for the personal and financial relationship he maintained with the late convicted sex trafficker, which included a $158 million payment not long after Epstein first became a registered sex offender.

He met with the committee in May for a transcribed interview but declined to speak at length about non-disclosure agreements he entered into with women tied to Epstein. As a result, the panel subpoenaed him to turn over those documents, to which Black responded by refusing to submit all those in his possession and then skipping a scheduled appearance before the panel slated for Sept. 3 — suing the committee instead.

Black’s lawyers, Susan Estrich and Aaron Cutler, in a statement before the votecalled for the House Oversight contempt vote to be postponed.

“This entire charade is about politics and ambition. Given our litigation against Chairman Comer and the Committee, the possible ethics violations by Chairman Comer, the false and potentially libelous and defamatory statements by Ranking Member Garcia, there are more than enough reasons to postpone this mark-up and contempt resolution,” the attorneys said.

The contempt resolution now heads to the full House, which also must vote on whether to refer the matter to the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia for possible indictment.

Comer said it was now up to GOP leadership whether it would schedule the resolution for consideration before the House leaves at the end of the week for recess until after the midterms. A spokesperson for Speaker Mike Johnson did not immediately return a request for comment.