Trump Investigations and DOJ Oversight

Newly released documents from Sen. Chuck Grassley show that then–Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team secretly subpoenaed Verizon for more than two years’ worth of phone toll records for Kash Patel — now the FBI director — while investigating Donald Trump. The subpoenas, which Patel first alluded to publicly in February, sought his call records from October 2020 through February 2023 and were paired with one‑year court‑ordered gag orders barring Verizon from telling him. The records cover the tail end of Patel’s service in the first Trump administration and his subsequent role as a prominent pro‑Trump commentator at a time when he was also a known witness in the FBI’s classified‑documents probe, though it is unclear which Trump investigation the subpoenas were tied to. Grassley released the material ahead of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the FBI’s 'Arctic Frost' investigation, where Republicans compared the Trump probes to a 'modern Watergate' and Democrats argued Patel’s own public statements about declassification made him an obvious fact witness. The disclosures deepen Republican claims that the Biden‑era Justice Department overreached in its Trump investigations, even as Smith has repeatedly defended his work as apolitical and by‑the‑book.