A federal agent assigned to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Donald Trump said prosecutors kept him in the dark that phone data he was gathering under grand jury subpoenas belonged to members of Congress and that he would have had reservations about doing so if he had been told, according to explosive testimony released Tuesday night by the House Judiciary Committee.
Retired Justice Department Inspector General Special Agent Brian Burnett was quoted in the transcript as saying that during his decades working at the DOJ’s watchdog, he never once was asked to collect congressional phone data and did not learn until after he retired in late 2024 that he had unwittingly done so as part of his work for Smith’s team prosecuting Trump in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot investigation code-named Arctic Frost.
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