Member Of Jack Smith’s Team Comes Forward With New Information, Throws Smith Under The Bus

A retired Justice Department Office of Inspector General special agent who assisted in serving subpoenas during the Arctic Frost investigation, which were later incorporated into Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe, testified that he was not informed the phone records he helped obtain belonged to members of Congress.

Brian Burnett, who retired in late 2024 after 15 years with the inspector general’s office, told House Judiciary Committee investigators that prosecutors provided him only phone numbers, without identifying the subscribers. The records in question included long-distance toll data associated with then-Ranking Member Jim Jordan of the House Judiciary Committee.

“I would’ve subpoenaed the number, but I did not know who the phone number belonged to, who the actual subscriber was,” Burnett said. He added that he learned of the connection only after retiring, when news reports and a publicly posted subpoena appeared.

“It was not until I had been retired and this was on the news and there was conversation about Mr. Jordan’s toll records being subpoenaed and then there was a subpoena that came up on the internet,” he testified. “So I was only assuming—that had my name on it—that that was his number. But I do not know, as we sit here today, if that was his number or not.”

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Breaking: Agent in Jack Smith case says he was kept in dark that subpoenaed phone data belonged to Congress https://t.co/rkcJxhCVz0

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) September 22, 2026

When asked whether prosecutors had told him he was serving a subpoena for the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Burnett replied, “No. I don’t have any recollection of that.” He said that knowledge of the subscriber’s identity “would’ve been something I would’ve brought up to my supervisor, if there was a different process or something we needed to be doing if we were going to do that. But I was not aware.”

The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section had approved the investigative step targeting Jordan’s records in April 2022 and was aware of the subscriber’s identity, according to testimony from Smith team prosecutor Timothy “Tad” Duree. Burnett, however, received only the number. He described the records sought by assistant U.S. attorneys as typically nameless: “Just phone numbers.”

Burnett also characterized the overall investigation as unusual in his 30 years of law enforcement experience. He said investigative steps normally handled by agents were instead directed by prosecutors. “A normal investigation would be, I would do the investigation, become familiar with everything, you know, do grand jury subpoenas, do the normal investigative process, follow the normal investigative steps. But, in this case, those steps were given to us by the prosecution team,” he testified.

When asked if he had encountered a similar dynamic before, he answered, “Not in my entire 30 years of law enforcement.”

The recordsin question pertain to the Arctic Frost investigation, which was the FBI’s official title for its probe into efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential election results that was later transferred to Smith’s office in November 2022.

The messages originated from a June 2023 subpoena issued by Smith’s office to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The subpoena sought text messages from October 2020 through January 20, 2021, from phones associated with White House personnel during President Trump’s first term, including Trump, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and others.

Smith is set to testify before the House Judiciary Committee next week.

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