Chuck Grassley Caught Verizon Hiding the Smoking Gun That Nailed Jack Smith For Going After Americans Without a Warrant

Jack Smith secretly used warrantless grand jury subpoenas to get the phone records of Republicans under an Obama judge's gag order.

Verizon seemingly knew the warrantless searches crossed a line but handed over the data anyway.

Now Grassley wants to know exactly why Verizon buried that discovery for two years.

Verizon Complied While AT&T Told Smith No

Jack Smith ran Arctic Frost like his own private surveillance operation against the president's allies.

In May 2023 his office subpoenaed Verizon and AT&T for the phone toll records of senators tied to January 6.

Ten senators and one House member were swept into those subpoenas, and two of the numbers belonged to the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms.

AT&T got a subpoena for Ted Cruz's records and refused.

The company challenged Smith's legal basis and he backed down without producing a single record.

Verizon got a similar request and did the opposite.

It handed over its share of the tolling data, no questions asked.

Gag orders like that typically run about a year, meaning this one would have lifted around mid-2024.

Verizon didn't say a word when it lifted.

Congress only found out because Grassley's team went digging in 2025, when Verizon finally admitted "human error" had caused the omission.

Grassley's New Letter Exposes a Timeline Verizon Can't Square

Chuck Grassley isn't buying the excuse and he brought fifteen colleagues with him to say so.

His new letter lands on Verizon CEO Dan Schulman's desk with a deadline of August 13.

Grassley wants to know exactly when Schulman and three other Verizon executives first learned about the May 2023 subpoena.

He wants internal records, not talking points.

Here's the problem for Verizon.

Back in October 2023, Grassley asked the company to search every DOJ legal request touching Senate devices going back to 2016.

Verizon's search turned up nothing before October 2019, and the Arctic Frost subpoena wasn't in the results.

That means either Verizon's search process is worthless or someone inside the company knew and stayed quiet.

Grassley isn't letting either answer off the hook.

He's demanding to know why the omission wasn't caught even though Verizon has acknowledged two Sergeant-at-Arms numbers sat inside that same subpoena.

A phone company doesn't misplace a federal subpoena naming the people who guard the United States Senate.

Republicans have called Arctic Frost worse than Watergate for a reason.

Smith's operation didn't just target Trump.

It swept up more than 400 Republican groups and individuals, along with Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA.

Grassley and Ron Johnson have now identified 84 separate Arctic Frost subpoenas sent to Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile.

Ten of those subpoenas targeted 20 sitting or former Republican members of Congress.

Boasberg signed off on the secrecy every time.

Texas Rep. Brandon Gill has already filed articles of impeachment against him over it.

Verizon Had Every Chance to Come Clean and Didn't

Strip away the corporate language and here's what actually happened.

A telecom giant sat on proof that the Biden Justice Department seized a sitting senator's phone records, and it only spoke up once Grassley's investigators forced the issue.

That's not a filing error.

Verizon picked a side, and it wasn't yours.

That excuse doesn't hold up against the calendar either.

The standard one-year clock means Verizon was free to talk by mid-2024.

Nothing stopped Schulman's team from picking up the phone and calling the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms the moment that order expired.

They didn't.

They waited until Grassley's staff came asking, then offered an excuse that explains nothing about the year-plus of silence in between.

Every senator whose data got scooped up deserves those internal records Grassley is demanding, and they deserve them before August 13, not after.

Sources:

• Charles Creitz, "Jack Smith's Senate phone records probe turns to Verizon's handling of subpoenas," Fox News, July 31, 2026.
• Chuck Grassley, "Grassley Releases New Arctic Frost Records, Raising Additional Questions about Jack Smith's Conduct and Candor," U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, March 24, 2026.
• Chuck Grassley, "Grassley Demands Answers from Telecom Companies Who Turned Congressional Phone Records Over to Jack Smith," Office of Sen. Chuck Grassley, February 10, 2026.
• "Verizon to change its policies after Arctic Frost spying revelations," Washington Examiner, November 2025.
• Katelynn Richardson, "Obama Judge Who Greenlit Secret Subpoenas Targeting GOP Hit With Ethics Complaint," Daily Caller, 2025.