Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) filed a lawsuit Wednesday against former special counsel Jack Smith over the subpoena of her phone records he issued during the Arctic Frost investigation. Blackburn also alleged his appointment was unlawful.
Smith faced a grilling before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday over his investigation and prosecution of President Donald Trump for allegedly attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Arctic Frost investigation was later revealed to have involved Smith’s team secretly obtaining the phone records of several Republican lawmakers.
In a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, Blackburn alleged that Smith’s subpoena to obtain her phone records violated her rights under the speech or debate clause “by compelling disclosure of her legislative materials.” She alleged that the subpoenas did not give her an opportunity to challenge the request for her phone records, thereby violating her First and Fourth Amendment rights. Blackburn also claimed that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional.
“Even if everything else the Department of Justice did in this investigation were otherwise lawful—and it was not—some of its actions, and all of Defendant Smith’s related actions, became unlawful by putting an improperly appointed private citizen at the head of the investigation,” Blackburn’s lawsuit said, asking a judge “to ensure no future Attorney General ignores the Appointments Clause to enable similar civil rights violations.” “Such rampant illegality and disregard for the rights of a United States citizen and sitting senator must never occur again.”
Blackburn, who is currently running for governor in Tennessee, is seeking a declaration from the judge that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel in 2022, and she also asked for her phone records to be destroyed or returned to her, as well as for nominal damages of $1.
“Through his Arctic Frost witch hunt that targeted conservatives across America and even the President of the United States, Jack Smith perpetrated one of the worst abuses of government power in our nation’s history,” Blackburn said in a statement shortly after the lawsuit was filed. “This lawsuit is solely about holding Mr. Smith accountable and ensuring that our nation’s justice system can never again be weaponized against the American people.”
A hearing regarding management of the case has tentatively been set for January 2027, and the case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, per the federal court docket.
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Smith defended his actions regarding the Arctic Frost investigation during Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, saying he wanted to establish who communicated with whom, when calls occurred, and their duration, rather than contents of the calls, when collecting information as part of the sweeping investigation into the president. He also claimed that the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section approved of the subpoenas before seeking the phone toll records of members of Congress. However, critics have noted that Smith had little to no evidence that any of the targeted lawmakers were connected to a crime. Smith also drew criticism for seeking the records of dozens of conservative groups without clear evidence of illegal activity.
The investigations and prosecutions Smith pursued of Trump, regarding both his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, ended after Trump won the 2024 election. Smith resigned from the Department of Justice shortly before Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.