Prosecutors working under Jack Smith sought phone records for a widening group of Republican lawmakers, building a list large enough that someone inside the DOJ stopped and flagged it before it went any further up the chain.
“I’d like to seek [the Public Integrity Section’s] concurrence to get phone tolls for several MOCs who had contact with pertinent parties in our investigation. I’ll keep the timeframe tight—probably October 1, 2020, to January 31, 2021,” DOJ prosecutor Timothy Duree wrote.
That window covers the final stretch of the election and the weeks that followed. What started as a limited request did not remain limited for long.
Prosecutors identified lawmakers through their contacts with figures already under scrutiny, including Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani, and the effort grew into a list of at least 16 names, including House members, senators, and congressional staff. The list took shape step by step as investigators traced outward from contacts and added names based on who had spoken with whom.
As that list came together, the scale of the request became harder to ignore.
“And please there’s no hurry this morning… it just occurred to me that before we tell Main we are going to fire off subpoenas for so many members tolls I should make sure Jack’s aware,” prosecutor Raymond Hulser wrote, flagging both the number of lawmakers involved and the need to elevate the decision internally.
That is not routine. It shows that the request size had reached a point where someone inside the process wanted another check before it moved any further.
Prosecutors also had to decide who belonged on the list. At one point, Hulser directed another attorney to use the January 6 Committee’s report to identify lawmakers who had contact with Trump or his allies, and to use that material to shape the subpoena list rather than build it independently. From there, the names were narrowed and sorted into those who would be targeted first.
“Hulser later said Smith wanted to ‘narrow’ the list of 16 and determine which names should be included in the ‘first round’ of subpoenas.”
The records would not have included the content of calls or messages, but they would have shown who lawmakers were in contact with and when, giving investigators a sweeping view of communications tied to elected officials. It is not what was said that stands out here so much as the pattern of who was connected, and how often those connections appeared.
That is where the emails stop feeling narrow.
The list did not appear all at once. It took shape gradually, starting with known contacts, then expanding outward as more names were pulled in, and eventually shaped using material from the January 6 Committee before being narrowed again for rollout.
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Republicans say that crossed a line and point to constitutional protections for lawmakers, while Smith has maintained the subpoenas were proper and followed DOJ rules.
But read straight through, the emails do not feel like a one-off request. They read like something that kept building, name by name and contact by contact, until the list itself had grown large enough that someone inside the DOJ stepped in and pushed it up the chain.
And that shift matters, because it moves the focus away from what the subpoenas might have captured and back to how the targets were identified in the first place.
That leaves a harder question at the center of it:
How does a list like that get built at all?
Editor’s Note: The endless lawfare against Donald Trump was emblematic of the banana republic Biden regime.
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