At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Republican lawmakers repeatedly denounced Jack Smith, the former special counsel, and the Biden administration for taking the phone records of more than a half-dozen G.O.P. senators to determine who they spoke to just before and after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
The attacks formed a core part of Republicans’ response as Democrats on the panel grilled Attorney General Pam Bondi over President Trump’s increasing pressure on the Justice Department to prosecute his political enemies. Republicans used the phone records to argue instead that the Biden administration had politicized the department, though much remains unknown about the records’ role in the investigation, and there has been no evidence that the Biden White House influenced the inquiry.
Republicans pressed Ms. Bondi to investigate and punish anyone associated with the investigative step, such as the F.B.I. agents who examined the phone data of nine Republican lawmakers to determine who they called, who called them, and when and where the calls were made.
The analysis of phone toll records is a common investigative tactic, though there are occasional policy and political debates about when and how such data should be taken. Such toll record information does not include the contents of conversations, which would require a court-approved wiretap.
On Monday, Republicans revealed an internal F.B.I. document showing that the toll records were collected in September 2023, shortly after Mr. Smith indicted Mr. Trump for conspiracy and other crimes related to Jan. 6.
The committee’s chairman, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, called the move politically motivated “spying,” and said there was no factual predicate to justify examining the lawmakers’ phone records around the time of the riot by supporters of Mr. Trump.
One of the senators whose phone records were taken with a grand jury subpoena, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, erupted at the hearing over the issue.
“Can you tell me why my phone records,” taken at a time when he was the chairman of the committee, “were sought by the Jack Smith agents?” Mr. Graham asked. “Why did they ask to know who I called and what I was doing from January 4th to the 7th?”
He then asked Ms. Bondi if she thought that was an “abuse of power.”
The attorney general declined to answer, but said Mr. Smith “wasted $50 million” in an effort
to “put President Trump in jail.”
Another Republican lawmaker whose phone records were examined over that four-day period was Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who falsely claimed that the F.B.I. document showed agents had engaged in wiretapping.
“The F.B.I. tapped my phone,” Mr. Hawley said angrily.
Mr. Grassley and other lawmakers have hedged when asked if they plan to call Mr. Smith as a witness to discuss his investigation, saying they plan to let the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, conduct his own inquiry. At the hearing, Ms. Bondi said she “cannot discuss whether there is an ongoing investigation” into the matter.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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