Lawyers for Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated Donald J. Trump, on Tuesday denied accusations leveled by Republican lawmakers that he had surveilled or spied on senators as part of his inquiry.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accused Mr. Smith this month of “spying” on legislators because in 2023, he had sought phone records to and from nine Republican politicians during a four-day period of calls around Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Grassley called it “disturbing and outrageous political conduct by the Biden F.B.I.,” and suggested it was worse than Watergate. Since then, some Republican lawmakers have urged the Justice Department to open an internal investigation into Mr. Smith’s conduct.
Mr. Smith’s lawyers, Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski, denied the accusations in a letter to Mr. Grassley.
“A number of people have falsely stated that Mr. Smith ‘tapped’ senators’ phones, ‘spied’ on their communications, or ‘surveilled’ their conversations,” the lawyers said in the letter, adding: “Toll records are historical in nature, and do not include the content of calls. Wiretapping, by contrast, involves intercepting the telecommunications in real time, which the special counsel’s office did not do.”
Among the Republicans who had publicly accused Mr. Smith of wiretapping lawmakers was Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. He and other lawmakers urged the F.B.I. this month to investigate the issue further, and within days, two F.B.I. agents involved in the investigation were fired.
Mr. Smith’s legal team said he followed all Justice Department procedures in seeking the phone records, which were part of an effort to “confirm or refute reports by multiple news outlets that during and after the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol, President Trump and his surrogates attempted to call senators to urge them to delay certification of the 2020 election results.”
The letter also pushed back against the suggestion made by Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, that any of this investigative work was kept secret from officials or lawmakers, saying the phone records were subpoenaed “in an entirely lawful and appropriate manner.”
The letter noted that the public indictment of Mr. Trump specifically describes some of the calls made to senators. “Moreover, the precise records at issue were produced in discovery to President Trump’s personal lawyers, some of whom now serve in senior positions within the Department of Justice.”
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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