On July 22, 2026, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent a formal criminal referral letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, urging the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation into former special prosecutor Jack Smith for allegedly making false statements to Congress. The referral, made public on the committee's website as a PDF and announced via a formal press release on July 23, centers on what Jordan characterizes as a material discrepancy between Smith's sworn testimony and internal DOJ records about the scope of data his team obtained on members of Congress House Judiciary Committee.

Jordan's letter alleges that Smith "made willfully and intentionally false statements of material fact" to Congress regarding his team's access to phone records of Republican lawmakers during the Trump election-interference investigation. The factual core of the dispute is narrow but consequential. Smith testified before the committee in a closed-door session in December 2025 and in an open session in January 2026. During the December appearance, according to Jordan's account, Smith stated that his team had obtained only "toll records" — meaning phone numbers dialed, not the content of communications. But DOJ documents presented to the committee on July 14, 2026 reportedly showed that Smith's investigators had access to text messages belonging to 44 members of Congress The Guardian.

The committee published a redacted deposition transcript of Smith's closed-door testimony on its website in December 2025, making portions of the sworn record publicly available House Judiciary Committee. That transcript now serves as the textual foundation for the false-statements allegation.

Smith's legal team responded swiftly. Lawyers Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski sent their own letter to Acting AG Blanche, asserting that Smith "provided truthful, responsive answers" and characterizing the referral as "a chilling eagerness to weaponize the justice system." Their letter also noted that Smith was aware, at the time of his testimony, of the risk that Trump's Justice Department would seek to use his statements as the basis for a criminal charge — a signal that Smith's camp anticipated this precise move The Guardian.

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) issued a separate statement calling the referral "a laughably weak and vindictive criminal referral." Raskin defended Smith's testimony directly, stating that Smith's account of obtaining subpoenas for lawmakers' toll records "was true when he said it, and it is true today" House Judiciary Committee Democrats.

The Smith referral is not the committee's first targeting of prosecutors who worked on the Trump-related cases. On November 19, 2025, Jordan sent a separate criminal referral to Attorney General Pamela Bondi regarding Thomas Windom, a former senior assistant special counsel under Smith. That referral, which alleged "significant evidence of wrongdoing," followed an interview Windom sat for with congressional investigators in June 2025 Politico. The Windom and Smith referrals together trace a concerted committee effort to scrutinize, and potentially penalize, the prosecutorial team that brought federal charges against the now-president.

The distinction between "toll records" and text-message content is doing substantial legal work in this dispute. Toll records — metadata showing which numbers were called and when — are obtainable through standard grand jury subpoenas and carry lower privacy protections. Access to the content of text messages typically requires a higher legal threshold. Jordan's referral hinges on the argument that Smith's testimony minimized the scope of what his team accessed, while Smith's defenders maintain the two categories were accurately described and that obtaining toll records via subpoena is precisely what Smith testified to.

The referral now sits with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who must decide whether to open a formal investigation. The Justice Department has not publicly indicated a timeline for that decision. What is already visible is the political and legal architecture surrounding the move: a Republican-led committee chair invoking the false-statements statute against a former special counsel whose work targeted the president, a Democratic ranking member dismissing the referral as vindictive, and the referred prosecutor's own legal team preemptively framing any prosecution as weaponization.

This is a referral, not an indictment. It carries no independent legal force. Its weight depends entirely on whether the Justice Department chooses to act on it — and if so, how far. The November 2025 Windom referral, now eight months old, may offer one early indicator of how the department handles Jordan's requests.