WASHINGTON — Special counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed hundreds of pages of future FBI Director Kash Patel’s phone records, credit card records and other bank information as part of his investigation of GOP figures — including President Trump and sitting lawmakers — in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Senate Judicidiary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), released dozens of pages of internal DOJ records detailing Smith’s requests as part of Operation Arctic Frost ahead of a subcommittee hearing Tuesday.
Those included subpoenas for Patel, then a private citizen, to determine whom he was calling and texting and what sorts of payments he made for those services.
Patel, who was then a private citizen, is now director of the FBI. AP
Reuters first reported on the extent of the Patel subpoenas Tuesday.
“What we confront today, the Biden administration’s ‘Arctic Frost’ scheme, is not a single act,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action and Federal Rights, said in his opening remarks.
“It is a modern Watergate, trading a break-in at one office for a digital sweep into approximately 100,000 private communications, more than a dozen senators and thousands of individuals’ lives.”
Following Smith’s appointment by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022, the special counsel’s office fired off hundreds of subpoenas with non-disclosure orders targeting more than 400 Republican individuals and groups — including Patel, Cruz, current White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, and 11 other members of Congress.
“Imagine if a judge, a Republican-appointed judge, signed an order that said Sen. [Dick] Durbin [D-Ill.] will destroy evidence if he is aware of this subpoena,” Cruz said, referring to the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat. “Would anyone in this hearing room call that routine?”
Smith told lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee in December 2025 that the execution of the subpoenas was “consistent with department policy,” but acknowledged the “policy has since changed.”
Senate Democrats, and a former FBI special agent who testified Tuesday, insisted that the subpoenas were lawful.
FBI Director Kash Patel at an event in Memphis, Tennessee, on Monday, March 23, 2026. AFP via Getty Images
“Patel made himself a fact witness in that investigation. 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,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said.
The subpoenas to Patel’s phone carrier, Verizon, covered all calls between Jan. 1, 2021, and Nov. 23, 2022, the date the request was made. Another request sought phone records from Oct. 1, 2020, to Feb. 22, 2023, the records show.
The so-called toll analysis, which law enforcement officials have stressed is a routine method for gathering information, included records of calls and text messages sent and received from other numbers as well as the duration of verbal conversations — but no content of those calls or messages.
Sen. Ted Cruz at a committee hearing on Tuesday, March 24, 2026. Getty Images
As part of the inquiry, information about Patel’s credit and bank accounts used for phone payments were requested, along with his residential and email addresses.
In a February hearing, Verizon general counsel Chris Miller denied that the carrier had violated lawmakers’ constitutional rights by acquiescing to the subpoena without notifying them.
“We were compelled to provide this information under the law. And we complied. No matter who is the subject of a subpoena, Verizon cannot ignore a valid legal demand or a court order,” Miller told senators on another Judiciary subcommittee.
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Then-DC US Magistrate Judge James Mazzone signed off on the November 2023 subpoena via a non-disclosure order appended to the request by Smith’s team.
The order claimed that the individual whose records being subpoenaed was potentially a flight risk or could tamper with evidence, destroy it, badger other potential witnesses or put the special counsel’s probe in jeopardy.
New emails released by Grassley also showed that Smith wanted toll records from nearly a dozen additional lawmakers — including then-Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), who now serves as Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator.
Grassley dubbed the requests a “wish list” that raises “additional questions about Smith’s conduct, need for member data and candor to the court and the public.”
The Iowa Republican also addressed Democrats who have criticized his characterization of Smith’s investigation as a “fishing expedition.”
“The Democrats have criticized us for not bringing Jack Smith before us at the beginning, and you’ve heard that again today,” he said. “If we followed the Democrats’ premature and ill-advised strategy, we wouldn’t have had a great deal of information we now have that shows Jack Smith misled Congress and the public, if not outright lied.”
Reps for Verizon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.