Jack Smith spent the better part of two years trying to put Donald Trump behind bars.
Now Smith is the one sitting in the hot seat. And Senate Republicans keep pulling paperwork out of the government’s own filing cabinets.
But Chuck Grassley just got his hands on one set of records that makes a single answer from Smith look awfully slippery.
The Question Smith Didn’t Quite Answer
Former Attorney General Merrick Garland handpicked Smith in November 2022 to run two investigations of President Trump. One centered on the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The other targeted Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election results, a case Smith brought in heavily Democrat Washington, DC.
US Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, hauled Smith in for a recent oversight hearing on how he ran those probes.
Grassley asked a simple question. According to the committee’s own transcript, he wanted to know: “Have you ever received any consultation or counsel by John Brennan, former CIA Director, whether during your time as Special Counsel or otherwise?”
Smith’s reply was short. “I’ve never met John Brennan.”
Grassley came back to it later in the hearing, asking whether Smith had ever had a conversation with Brennan.
“I have no recollection of having a conversation with John Brennan,” Smith said, according to Fox News.
Notice something? Grassley never asked whether Smith shook Brennan’s hand. He asked whether Brennan gave Smith’s operation any consultation or counsel. Those are two very different questions, and Smith answered the easier one.
What the Declassified Memo Shows
On October 5, 2026, the White House declassified records that tell a fuller story, Fox News reported.
Two assistant special counsels working for Smith sat down with Brennan in November 2023. FBI agents joined them. The meeting took place at CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia.
The stated purpose, according to the memo, was “to discuss expert testimony to National Defense Information in the forthcoming trial.” In plain English, Smith’s prosecutors went shopping for the former CIA chief’s national security expertise as they built their case against Trump.
The release also included two pages of notes on CIA headquarters letterhead. Government redactions blacked out the lines under Brennan’s name. The rest of the pages sit blank.
Grassley didn’t hold back when Fox News Digital asked him about it.
“This meeting occurred during Jack Smith’s time as Special Counsel and constitutes ‘consultation or counsel’ from John Brennan to Smith and his team,” Grassley said. “Smith’s response before the Senate Judiciary Committee was highly evasive and misleading, at minimum.”
Fox News reached out to Smith’s attorneys and to the Justice Department. Neither responded, according to the outlet. Smith has long maintained the evidence drove his decisions and that politics played no role.
Of All the Experts in Washington
Here’s the part that ought to make folks scratch their heads.
Brennan didn’t run the CIA during the period Smith’s documents case covered. Nothing in the released records suggests he had any firsthand knowledge of how Trump handled those boxes, Fox News noted.
So why him?
Washington, DC is crawling with retired intelligence officials who know their way around classification rules. Smith’s team could have called any number of them. Instead, they went to one of the loudest Trump critics in the entire national security world, a man Republicans have accused of helping drive the Russia collusion narrative that dogged Trump’s first term.
Maybe there’s an innocent explanation. Prosecutors talk to a lot of people. But Smith had every chance to offer that explanation in front of the committee, and he chose a narrower answer that sidestepped the question Grassley actually asked.
And when a prosecutor parses words that carefully, it usually means the plain answer wasn’t one he wanted to give.
A Pattern Smith Can’t Shake
The Brennan memo lands on a pile that keeps getting taller.
Grassley’s oversight already uncovered that Smith and the Biden FBI quietly subpoenaed phone records from nine Republican Members of Congress, along with records tied to 92 other Republican targets, as part of the probe the FBI code-named Arctic Frost. Grassley also pressed Smith at the hearing over his team acquiring financial information connected to Republican donors.
That’s not a narrow investigation into one man. That’s a dragnet thrown over half a political party.
Then there’s the legal foundation of the whole enterprise. In July 2024, US District Judge Aileen Cannon tossed the classified documents case entirely. She ruled that Garland had violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause by naming Smith, a private citizen whom no president nominated and no Senate confirmed. Smith appealed, but the ruling stands as a stark reminder that the man leading the charge against Trump may never have had lawful authority to do it.
Critics have been making this case for a while. “Jack Smith was a tool of the Biden administration to put Trump in prison,” Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said, according to Fox News. In a 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Dershowitz called Smith’s work “a partisan weapon that broke the rules, lied to the court and engaged in bad faith throughout.”
Investigative reporter John Solomon went further, describing the probes as part of a “10-year conspiracy to stop Donald Trump using the resources of the United States government.”
US Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) has also alleged Smith tried to sway the 2024 election, Fox News reported. And it’s hard to look at the timeline without wondering. Smith brought charges against the leading Republican candidate, filed the election case in a city where Trump never stood a chance with a jury, and pushed his cases forward as voters headed toward the 2024 contest.
But the voters handed Trump a mandate anyway.
Where This Goes Next
Grassley isn’t the type to let something drop. The Iowa Senator has spent decades chasing down federal agencies that thought they could stonewall Congress, and he has already demanded records from telecom companies and federal agencies tied to Smith’s work.
The Brennan meeting raises fresh questions. Who set it up? What did Brennan tell those prosecutors? What sits under those black redaction bars?
And the biggest one of all: what else did Smith leave out when he talked to the committee?
Every new batch of records from this saga seems to reveal another door the special counsel’s office opened that it never mentioned. If history is any guide, this won’t be the last one.
Sources:
“Ex-Obama spy chief prepped for anti-Trump trial by Biden-era special counsel’s team, new records reveal,” Fox News
“Grassley Questions Jack Smith at Senate Judiciary Oversight Hearing,” Senate Judiciary Committee
“Grassley Demands Telecommunications Companies, Federal Entities Turn Over All Records Provided to Jack Smith,” Senate Judiciary Committee
“Takeaways from the dismissal of the mishandling classified documents case against Donald Trump,” CNN
“Florida federal judge tosses out Trump classified documents case,” Roll Call
