John Kennedy Laid Into Jack Smith After He Vomited One Answer That Turned His Stomach On Camera
John Kennedy looked Jack Smith in the eye and said he wanted to throw up in his mouth.
That outburst came seconds after Smith admitted his investigators secretly pulled phone records from sitting Republican senators.
One exchange about Smith's legal credentials forced him to answer for exactly how far his dragnet reached.
Jack Smith Admits His Team Tracked Republican Senators' Private Phone Records
Kennedy did not open with pleasantries.
He opened by asking who exactly got swept into Smith's phone records dragnet.
"Any Democrats or just Republicans?" Kennedy asked.
Smith admitted the senators' toll records his team obtained belonged to Republicans only.
Kennedy then questioned whether Smith even understood the law he was applying.
"Were you in the quad playing Frisbee during Con Law at Harvard Law School?" Kennedy asked.
Smith said no, insisting he had studied constitutional law like everyone else.
Kennedy moved to the real target.
He asked Smith whether Merrick Garland cleared the Trump investigation with Joe Biden before it started.
Smith claimed ignorance three separate times.
"I have no idea what he did," Smith said of Garland.
Pressed again on whether the White House steered the probe, Smith repeated himself: "I have no idea about that."
Kennedy did not buy it.
He noted Smith had subpoenaed toll records belonging to sitting Republican senators and never disclosed to the court whose records they were.
"You didn't tell him, but you're unbiased, you have no personal feelings," Kennedy said.
"You make me want to throw up in my mouth."
Dick Durbin cut in and asked that Smith be allowed to answer the questions and complete a sentence.
Smith kept insisting he charged Trump on the facts alone.
Grassley Reveals the Judges Signed Off Without Knowing Who Got Hit
Chuck Grassley laid out numbers Kennedy never had time to reach.
Smith's Arctic Frost investigation sent at least 84 subpoenas connected to the probe.
Ten of those subpoenas covered toll records for twenty sitting or former Republican members of Congress.
Reporters at seventeen news organizations got swept up too, Grassley found.
CBS, CNN, Fox News, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and The Federalist all had communications caught in the same records haul.
Grassley says Smith's office never told the judges whose records they were requesting.
"Special Counsel Smith's office failed to disclose to the court that any subpoenas sought phone records for members of Congress," Grassley said.
A federal judge signed off believing he was looking at bare phone numbers, not the private communications of the president's political opposition in Congress.
Smith's team had been warned in writing.
Grassley cited a May 17, 2023 email in which Justice Department attorney John Keller warned a DOJ colleague that subpoenaing congressional records could violate the Speech and Debate Clause – the constitutional wall that shields lawmakers from exactly this kind of executive branch snooping.
Smith sent the subpoenas anyway and kept the courts in the dark about who was on the other end.
"In the end, Mr. Smith indicted one person," Grassley said. "That one person was President Trump, but in the process, he successfully mapped out the Republican apparatus."
Judges approved these orders one after another without ever asking who was really on the list.
That is a rubber stamp, and the record backs it up.
This is not the first time a special counsel outran his mandate.
Kenneth Starr's Whitewater assignment ballooned into the Monica Lewinsky investigation and ended in an impeachment nobody authorized when the probe began.
Robert Mueller ran two years and never charged a single Trump conspiracy count, yet his office's Russia dragnet still swallowed volumes of unrelated Americans' data along the way.
Smith took the model further: he did not just chase Trump, he built a phone-record map of the opposition party while telling federal judges nothing about it.
Smith Claimed Independence and the Record Says Otherwise
Smith walked into that Judiciary Committee room and claimed independence.
Grassley's numbers say he ran a surveillance operation on sitting Republican senators and hid it from the bench that approved it.
Kennedy's gag reflex was not theater – it was the only honest reaction to watching a man deny bias while his own subpoenas prove otherwise.
Smith is not facing another special counsel any time soon.
The Speech and Debate Clause warning his lawyers gave him in writing does not vanish because he ignored it, and a Justice Department under new leadership now has the paper trail to decide what happens next.
Sources:
- John Solomon, "Kennedy to Jack Smith: 'You make me want to throw up in my mouth,'" Just the News, Sept. 29, 2026.
- Kaelan Deese, "Kennedy berates Smith over conversations with Garland," Washington Examiner, Sept. 29, 2026.
- Emily Jacobs, "GOP senator gets a scolding after telling Jack Smith 'you make me want to throw up in my mouth,'" Mediaite, Sept. 29, 2026.
- Kyle Becker, "Jack Smith Crossed the Line: 87 White House Phones and Major News Outlets Swept Up in Dragnet," RedState, Sept. 29, 2026.
- U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, "Grassley Exposes Jack Smith's Lack of Candor to the Court," judiciary.senate.gov, 2026.
- Fox News Staff, "From Robert Mueller to Kenneth Starr, a Look at Special Prosecutors Throughout History," Fox News.
