Jack Smith never gave the meme’s toll-records answer to Sen. John Kennedy

Verdicts at a glance

• FalseSmith told Kennedy: “We requested toll records and texts, not names or individuals... There weren’t any.”
  Those words do not appear in the official caption track of the Sept. 29, 2026 Senate Judiciary hearing, the only time Kennedy questioned Smith that we found. Smith’s actual answer was: “The toll records that we sought were relevant to the investigation, and they were Republicans.”^[2]
• MixedKennedy asked: “So you admit you only targeted Republicans. No Democrats huh?”
  Kennedy did press Smith on this point, but his words were “Any Democrats or just Republicans?” Smith did not “admit” targeting. He confirmed the records were Republicans’ and said they were sought because they were relevant to the investigation. When Kennedy added that Smith knew this “violated the Speech and Debate Clause,” Smith answered, “That is incorrect.”^[2]
• FalseSmith’s office requested phone records without targeting names or individuals.
  The toll-record subpoenas went to carriers for specific lawmakers’ phone numbers. An FBI document lists the senators by name, and the Justice Department says the team sought approval “to target the toll records of several Senators and Congressmen.”^[7][8]
• MixedThe only calls and texts that turned up in Smith’s records involved Republicans.
  Every lawmaker whose toll records were sought was a Republican, as Smith confirmed. The text messages are another matter: the Justice Department lists 44 lawmakers whose texts with White House staff reached Smith’s team, and 4 of them are Democrats.^[2][7][8]
• TrueImplied: Smith acknowledged that the lawmakers whose toll records he sought were all Republicans.
  He said so under oath at the Senate hearing.^[2]
• UnprovenImplied: Smith’s office chose those lawmakers because they were Republicans.
  No released document shows party as a selection criterion. The documents released so far tie the choice to contact with Trump, Rudy Giuliani and others in the effort to delay certification. Motive has not been tested in any court.^[4][5][8]

The meme

An image carrying the watermark “socially unexceptional” pairs photos labeled “Sen John Kennedy (GOPt) LA” and “Special Council Jack Smith.” The top line, presented as Kennedy’s question, reads: “So you admit you only targeted Republicans. No Democrats huh?” The bottom text, presented as Smith’s answer, reads: “We requested toll records and texts, not names or individuals. It turns out the only calls and texts in and out turned out to be Republicans. Had there been Democrats records would have shown that too. There weren’t any.”

The image links to no original post, and we did not find one. This check rates the attribution and the factual claims separately. A quote can be invented and still echo a real argument, and both are true here.

Did the exchange happen?

Partly. Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026, at a hearing the Republican majority titled “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters.”^[1] Kennedy questioned him for about ten minutes, and the last two minutes covered lawmakers’ phone records. The Senate’s own video carries a live caption track. Here is the relevant passage as captioned, with time stamps from the start of the recording:^[2]

Kennedy then asked whether Smith had told Judge Boasberg that the records belonged to members of Congress. Smith answered, “In seeking nondisclosure orders, we did not.” Kennedy closed with “You make me want to throw up in my mouth.”^[2] An unofficial transcript published by a writer who is openly critical of the committee’s Republicans matches this wording closely, and CBS News reported the same sequence.^[3][11]

Rating the attribution. The meme’s answer is not a verbatim quote, and it is not a fair paraphrase. Two of its sentences have a real echo: Smith started to say “If President Trump had reached out to Democrats” before Kennedy cut him off, and he did confirm the toll records were Republicans’. The rest is invented. Smith never said “not names or individuals,” never said “texts” in that exchange and never said “There weren’t any.” The invented line is also the one that misstates the facts, as the next section shows. Kennedy’s question is closer to the record in substance, but “you admit” and “targeted” are the meme’s words, not his.

Where we looked. We searched the full caption track of the Sept. 29 hearing, which runs four hours and 28 minutes through adjournment, for “names,” “individuals,” “texts” and “weren’t any.” We read the toll-records passages of the 255-page transcript of Smith’s Dec. 17, 2025 House Judiciary deposition, where Kennedy, a senator, did not question him.^[4] Web searches for the meme’s exact sentences returned nothing. The Senate has not yet published a printed hearing transcript, so the caption track is the best record available today. Live captions can garble words, which is why we checked them against the unofficial transcript. Not finding the meme’s sentences is a search result. It is backed here by an affirmative record of what Smith did say at that moment.

What Smith’s office obtained

Toll records: whose, when and how

Toll records are carrier logs of calls: the numbers on each end, the start time and the duration. They carry no content. Smith described them this way in his House deposition, and when Democratic staff asked whether the senators’ toll records included “the content of the phone calls” and “the content of text messages,” he answered “No” to both.^[4] Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), whose office released the FBI document, says the data also shows “general location data of the call.”^[6]

An FBI electronic communication dated Sept. 27, 2023, released by Grassley, records “preliminary toll analysis on limited tolls records associated with the following US Senators” and lists eight senators and one House member, each followed by a redacted phone number: Mike Kelly, Lindsey Graham, Bill Hagerty, Josh Hawley, Dan Sullivan, Tommy Tuberville, Ron Johnson, Cynthia Lummis and Marsha Blackburn.^[7] All nine are Republicans. Grassley’s release says the data covered January 4 through January 7, 2021, and Smith gave the same window in his deposition.^[4][6]

The House Judiciary Committee’s Republican majority, in a Sept. 23, 2026 interim staff report, puts the total higher. It says the Justice Department seized “the telephone records of at least 17 Republican Members of Congress” between April 2022 and May 2023, a span that begins before the investigation was assigned to Smith in November 2022, and that Smith’s team “proposed over a dozen additional toll record subpoenas for Republican Members of Congress” after he took over.^[5][6] That count is the majority’s characterization of documents it holds. We found no released document showing a toll-record subpoena for a Democratic lawmaker in this investigation.

The legal process was a grand jury subpoena to the phone carrier, which needs no judge. A judge became involved only for the nondisclosure orders that barred carriers from telling customers. Smith confirmed both points in the deposition and said his team sought the orders because “there was a grave risk of obstruction of justice.”^[4] He also testified that the applications did not have to identify members of Congress at the time, and that department rules changed in 2024 to require it.^[4]

Were the targets names, or whoever called?

Named lawmakers. The meme’s “not names or individuals” is wrong on the documents. A subpoena for toll records names a phone number, and the numbers here were matched to specific members. The FBI document lists them by name.^[7] The current Justice Department, whose letter describes “the Biden administration’s weaponization efforts,” wrote in July 2026 that his team “sought and received approval to target the toll records of several Senators and Congressmen based on the belief that they had communicated with President Trump or Rudy Giuliani regarding potentially delaying the Senate’s vote to certify the election.”^[8]

The House majority’s report, citing internal emails, says a prosecutor built a list of “14 Members and one staffer” after consulting the Jan. 6 Select Committee’s final report, and at that stage left Hawley off because he did not “have a phone number for him.”^[5] In the Senate, Durbin asked where the numbers came from. Smith said: “With respect to how agents figured out or thought they had figured out which phones belonged to which senators, I don’t have an answer for that.”^[2]

The selection rule, in Smith’s telling, was contact with Trump’s side, not party. That is the strongest part of his defense, and the meme garbles it into a claim about not naming anyone.

Text messages: content, through a different door

The meme says “toll records and texts.” Smith’s team did end up with lawmakers’ texts, but not through the toll subpoenas and not by naming members. In June 2023 a Smith prosecutor asked the National Archives for all text messages from October 2020 through Jan. 20, 2021, “from phones associated with a long list of White House personnel.” The Archives delivered 54 spreadsheets on Aug. 21, 2023, and the Justice Department says the investigators “apparently bypassed the Filter Team and directly accessed these text messages.” The department then lists 44 senators and representatives whose texts with White House staff were in the set.^[8]

Four of the 44 are Democrats: Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Reps. Adam Smith of Washington, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Karen Bass of California. The other 40 are Republicans, Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) among them.^[8][9] Grassley’s own release says the texts came from “dozens of my Republican and Democrat colleagues,” and the House majority’s report says the set implicated “both Republicans and Democrats in both chambers of Congress.”^[5][9] At the hearing, Booker said, “My text messages were part of it. Karen Bass’ text messages were part of it.”^[2] So “the only calls and texts in and out turned out to be Republicans” is false for texts, by the accounts of both parties and of the current Justice Department.

For calls, the meme has the targets right: the lawmakers whose toll logs were pulled were Republicans. Whether any Democrat shows up as the other party on those logs is not public.

What Smith has said, on the record

The closest real version of the meme’s argument comes from Smith’s closed-door House deposition on Dec. 17, 2025, not from the Senate hearing. Asked who should be held accountable for the subpoenas, he said:

“Well, I think who should be accountable for this is Donald Trump. These records are people, in the case of the Senators, Donald Trump directed his co-conspirators to call these people to further delay the proceedings. He chose to do that. If Donald Trump had chosen to call a number of Democratic Senators, we would have gotten toll records for Democratic Senators.”Jack Smith, House Judiciary Committee deposition, Dec. 17, 2025, transcript pp. 102-103^[4]

His prepared statement that day put it more briefly: “I did not choose those Members, President Trump did.”^[4] At the Senate hearing he told Durbin the January 6 toll records “corroborated evidence that we had” that Trump and his co-conspirators “were seeking to exploit the violence on January 6 in furtherance of their criminal scheme.”^[2] Asked by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) about the texts, Smith said the National Archives material “happened to have contacts with members of Congress in it” and that “that does not mean we are seeking their records.”^[2]

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) read Smith’s deposition answer, “It was just toll records,” and said “That was a lie,” accusing Smith of misleading the House about texts. Smith replied, “I answered every question I was asked.”^[2] The House majority referred Smith to the Justice Department in July 2026 over the same deposition answers; that is an accusation, not a finding.^[5]

What the meme implies

A reader takes two things from the image beyond its literal text.

Implied: Smith conceded that the lawmakers whose toll records he sought were all Republicans

True. Under oath he said “they were Republicans,” and no released document shows a Democratic lawmaker’s toll records in this investigation.^[2][7] The concession is real; the meme’s framing of it as an admission of targeting is not his.

Implied: Smith’s office chose those lawmakers because they were Republicans

Unproven. The hearing’s title asserts it, and Blackburn’s lawsuit, filed Sept. 30, alleges that Smith targeted her for her politics.^[1][13] Those are claims. The documents released so far, including ones produced by a Justice Department adverse to Smith, give a contact-based reason: the members were believed to have communicated with Trump, Giuliani or others pressing to delay certification.^[5][8] If the calls pressing to delay certification went to Republicans, a contact-based rule would produce an all-Republican list without party being the test. The same investigation pulled in four Democrats’ texts when the selection key was White House custodians rather than lawmakers.^[8] No court has ruled on motive.

The case for the meme

The meme’s defenders can say it captures Smith’s real position: Trump’s side made the calls, Smith followed them, and Democrats would have been swept in had they been called. That position is documented in his own words.^[4] On toll records, the meme’s bottom line, that the targets were Republicans, is accurate.

The problem is the quotation marks. The meme puts invented sentences in Smith’s mouth, at a hearing where his actual answer is on video, and the invented sentence about “not names or individuals” is false on the FBI’s and the Justice Department’s own documents. The “only Republicans” line also fails for texts. A sympathetic paraphrase that gets the key facts wrong is still a fabricated quote.

From the other side, critics of Smith could argue the meme understates the problem: secret orders kept members from contesting the subpoenas, and the texts were reviewed without a filter team. Those are live disputes, argued in the House report and Blackburn’s suit, and they are separate from whether the meme quotes Smith accurately.^[5][13]

Implications

The meme matters less as a smear or a defense than as a pattern: a real exchange, a confirmed fact (all-Republican toll targets) and an invented quote stitched together so the invented part borrows credibility from the real part. Readers who check the video find Kennedy did ask about Democrats, and may assume the rest is accurate.

On substance, the open questions are legal. Whether toll records of members’ calls with the executive branch are protected by the Speech or Debate Clause, and whether nondisclosure orders may hide a member’s identity from the judge, are now before a federal court in Blackburn’s suit.^[13] Neither question turns on party.

There is a comparison case. During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department subpoenaed communication records of two House members and 43 congressional staffers in leak investigations, according to a 2024 inspector general report as summarized by NPR. The members are known to be Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell; of the staffers, 21 were Democrats and 20 were Republicans. The inspector general found no evidence of political motivation by the prosecutors but warned such subpoenas risk “chilling Congress’s ability to conduct oversight.”^[12] Whitehouse raised that case at the hearing, saying the department then “subpoenaed Democrats’ toll records, and you subpoenaed Republicans toll records, correct?” Smith answered, “Correct.”^[2] The practice has hit both parties, depending on who was in the investigators’ path.

What to watch

Blackburn’s lawsuit in the Middle District of Tennessee will test the Speech or Debate argument against Smith personally.^[13] The House majority’s referral of Smith over his deposition answers on texts sits with the Justice Department.^[5] When the Senate prints the official hearing transcript, it can be checked against the caption wording quoted here.