On July 22, 2026, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent a formal criminal referral letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, asking the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation into former special prosecutor Jack Smith for allegedly making false statements to Congress. A criminal referral is a formal request from a congressional committee asking DOJ to investigate someone — it is not a charge, and it carries no legal force on its own. The referral was published on the committee's website as a PDF and announced via press release on July 23 House Judiciary Committee.

The dispute centers on what Jordan calls a material discrepancy between Smith's sworn testimony and internal DOJ records. Smith led the federal investigation into Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. During a closed-door session with the committee in December 2025, and again in an open session in January 2026, Smith testified about what kinds of data his team collected on members of Congress during that investigation.

According to Jordan's account, Smith told the committee in December that his team obtained only "toll records" — phone metadata showing which numbers were dialed and when, but not the content of any communication. Toll records are obtainable through standard grand jury subpoenas and carry fewer privacy protections. But DOJ documents shown to the committee on July 14, 2026 reportedly revealed that Smith's investigators had access to text-message content belonging to 44 members of Congress The Guardian. Access to message content typically requires a higher legal threshold than metadata alone.

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

Smith's legal team — lawyers Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski — sent their own letter to Acting AG Blanche, asserting that Smith "provided truthful, responsive answers" and calling the referral "a chilling eagerness to weaponize the justice system." Their letter also noted that Smith was aware, at the time of his testimony, that Trump's Justice Department might try to use his statements as the basis for criminal charges — 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, saying 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.

This is not the committee's first action targeting 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 distinction between toll records and text-message content is central to the legal weight of Jordan's argument. Jordan contends that Smith's testimony understated the scope of what his team accessed. Smith's defenders maintain that 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.

The broader context here is a Republican-led committee chair invoking the false-statements statute against a former special counsel whose work targeted the now-president, a Democratic ranking member dismissing the referral as vindictive, and the referred prosecutor's legal team preemptively framing any prosecution as weaponization of the justice system. The Windom referral, now eight months old, may offer an early indicator of how the department handles Jordan's requests — and whether this referral moves beyond a letter into an actual investigation.