The general counsels of America's three largest cell phone carriers sat before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Tuesday morning and defended their companies' decisions to hand over lawmakers' phone data to former special counsel Jack Smith — data obtained through subpoenas issued under non-disclosure orders that kept the targeted members of Congress entirely in the dark.
At least 84 subpoenas hit AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon as part of Smith's investigation. Ten of those subpoenas targeted the records of 20 current or former lawmakers. The companies complied. The lawmakers never knew.
That silence is the heart of the scandal.
According to Politico, each executive offered a variation on the same theme: we followed the law. T-Mobile general counsel Mark Nelson told the subcommittee that when T-Mobile receives valid demands from government entities, it responds "as required by law and with customer privacy top of mind." Verizon Consumer general counsel Chris Miller acknowledged the situation was imperfect but insisted his company operated within the legal framework. AT&T general counsel David McAtee offered a slightly different picture — his company actually pushed back.
McAtee testified that AT&T raised the Speech or Debate Clause with Smith's office when asked to produce lawmakers' phone data. The clause, a constitutional protection designed to shield legislators from executive branch intimidation, should have given any prosecutor pause. Smith's team apparently felt otherwise.
"The Special Counsel's office never responded to that email, at least not substantively. And ultimately, the office abandoned the subpoena, and no records were produced."
So when AT&T flagged a constitutional concern, Smith's office went quiet — and eventually walked away. That raises an obvious question: if the subpoena couldn't survive a polite email about constitutional protections, how solid was the legal basis in the first place?
T-Mobile and Verizon, by contrast, did not mount similar challenges. They turned over the records. Verizon, which controlled many accounts for lawmakers' personal and official phones, bore the brunt of senatorial anger.
Sen. Lindsey Graham's phone records were seized as part of Smith's probe. Graham directed his frustration squarely at Verizon's Miller:
"I don't think I deserve what happened to me."
"You failed me. You failed to honor the contract protecting us all."
Graham was among the most vocal in arguing that he and other affected lawmakers should be compensated. Sens. Josh Hawley and John Kennedy also gave Miller an earful during the hearing. The anger wasn't performative — these are sitting U.S. senators whose private communications were swept up by a political prosecution, and the companies they pay for phone service helped make it happen without so much as a courtesy call.
Miller, to his credit, conceded what others wouldn't:
"These were unprecedented circumstances, and while we fully complied with the law, we also acknowledge that we could have done better in terms of our process. One year ago, we began working with the Senate Sergeant at Arms on changes to the handling of legal demands for official Senate lines. And we have expanded those changes to include personal and campaign lines."
"Could have done better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Verizon handed a politically motivated special counsel the call records of elected officials, shielded by non-disclosure orders that prevented those officials from knowing, challenging, or contesting the surveillance. A year later, they started talking to the Sergeant at Arms about maybe improving the process.
The carriers are the middlemen. The real question is what Jack Smith's office was doing issuing 84 subpoenas — ten of them targeting lawmakers — while operating under non-disclosure orders that ensured no one on Capitol Hill could raise a constitutional objection in real time.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley framed it plainly in his opening statement:
"Smith and his team irresponsibly steamrolled ahead while intentionally hiding their activities from Members of Congress."
Grassley has pledged to call Smith to testify before his committee in the coming months. Smith recently appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, where he maintained that politics played no role in his work and said he would have made the same prosecutorial decisions regardless of whether the former president was Republican or Democratic.
That claim grows harder to sustain with each new revelation. Dozens of felony charges were levied against a political opponent. Subpoenas vacuuming up the phone records of Republican lawmakers. Non-disclosure orders ensured none of the targets could fight back. And when one carrier — AT&T — raised a basic constitutional question, the special counsel's office abandoned the subpoena rather than answer it. That's not the behavior of a prosecution confident in its legal footing. That's the behavior of a prosecution hoping no one would ask.
Ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin offered the Democratic response, which amounted to: why are we even talking about this?
"This is frankly an embarrassing use of the committee's limited time, and I urge my colleagues to turn their attention to the threats that President Trump currently poses to our democracy."
A special counsel secretly obtained the phone records of sitting members of Congress, and the Democratic position is that investigating it wastes time. Durbin did say Smith should testify "as soon as possible," — but the framing tells you everything. For Democrats, the surveillance of Republican lawmakers isn't a civil liberties concern. It's an inconvenience that distracts from their preferred narrative.
Imagine, for one moment, the reaction if a Trump-era special counsel had secretly subpoenaed the phone records of 20 Democratic lawmakers. The words "constitutional crisis" would have trended for a week. Every editorial board in America would have discovered a sudden passion for the Speech or Debate Clause. The asymmetry isn't subtle.
Grassley's pledge to haul Smith before the Senate Judiciary Committee sets up the next act. Smith's House testimony offered his version of events — no political motivation, just following the facts. But the facts now include a special counsel who issued subpoenas he abandoned the moment a carrier questioned their constitutionality, who operated behind non-disclosure orders that neutralized congressional oversight, and who targeted the communications of the very legislators responsible for checking executive power.
The carriers will update their processes. Verizon already has. But process reforms don't answer the foundational question: What happens when a weaponized prosecution uses lawful mechanisms to achieve unlawful ends? The subpoenas were technically valid. The non-disclosure orders were technically legal. And yet the result was that a special counsel investigating the president's political allies secretly obtained the phone records of his political allies in Congress — and nobody could object because nobody knew.
The system worked exactly as Smith designed it to. That's the problem.
