: Former Special Counsel Jack Smith allegedly sought the private, personal cellphone records of then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy as part of his investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots, Fox News Digital has learned.

Smith also sought the private phone records of now-former Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas.

Fox News Digital exclusively reviewed the document that FBI Director Kash Patel recently shared with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson containing the explosive revelations. Grassley and Johnson have been leading a joint investigation into Smith’s ‘Arctic Frost’ probe.

According to the document, Smith, on Jan. 24, 2023, allegedly sought the ‘toll records for the personal cell phones of U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (AT&T) and U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert (Verizon.)’

The information was included as part of a ‘Significant Case Notification’ drafted by the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division May 25, 2023.

‘Jack Smith’s radical and deranged investigation was never about finding the truth,’ former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told Fox News Digital. ‘It was a blatant weaponizing of the Justice Department to attack political opponents of the Biden administration. Perhaps no action underscores this point more than the illegal attempt to access the phone records of sitting members of the House and Senate — including the Speaker of the House.’ 

‘His illegal targeting demands real accountability,’ McCarthy continued. ‘And I am confident Congress will hold hearings and access documents in its investigation into Jack Smith’s own abuses.’ 

‘At the same time, I will ask my own counsel to pursue all areas of redress so this does not happen to anyone else,’ McCarthy said. 

The revelations come after Fox News Digital exclusively reported in October that Smith and his ‘Arctic Frost’ team investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots were tracking the private communications and phone calls of nearly a dozen Republican senators as part of the probe, including Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and GOP Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania.

An official told Fox News Digital that those records were collected in 2023 by Smith and his team after subpoenaing major telephone providers. 

Smith has called his decision to subpoena and track Republican lawmakers’ phone records ‘entirely proper’ and consistent with Justice Department policy.

‘As described by various Senators, the toll data collection was narrowly tailored and limited to the four days from January 4, 2021 to January 7, 2021, with a focus on telephonic activity during the period immediately surrounding the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol,’ Smith’s lawyers wrote in October to Grassley.

Grassley, R-Iowa, and Johnson, R-Wis., have been investigating the matter, and seeking answers from major telephone providers.

In AT&T’s response to Grassley, it noted that Smith sought phone records for two members of Congress.

Fox News Digital has learned that AT&T informed Grassley’s staff that one of the members was Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, but refused to disclose the second member.

The newly declassified document reviewed by Fox News Digital appears to reveal that the second member of Congress that Smith sought records from AT&T for was McCarthy, R-Calif. 

Fox News Digital obtained AT&T’s response to Grassley, in which the company notes that Smith sent them a grand jury subpoena that included a request for phone records associated with two members of Congress.

‘However, when AT&T raised questions with Special Counsel Smith’s office concerning the legal basis for seeking records of members of Congress, the Special Counsel did not pursue the subpoena further, and no records were produced,’ AT&T told Grassley.

AT&T also stressed that the company ‘has not produced any records or other information to Special Counsel Jack Smith’ relating to ‘any member of Congress.’

‘Jack Smith’s Arctic Frost investigation looks more and more out of control with each passing day,’ Grassley told Fox News Digital. ‘Based on my oversight, it was a fishing expedition that swept up Republicans in and out of Congress, from top to bottom.’ 

‘Arctic Frost’ was opened inside the bureau April 13, 2022. Smith was appointed as special counsel to take over the probe in November 2022. 

An FBI official told Fox News Digital that ‘Arctic Frost’ is a ‘prohibited case,’ and that the review required FBI officials to go ‘above and beyond in order to deliver on this promise of transparency.’ The discovery is part of a broader ongoing review, Fox News Digital has learned.

Smith, after months of investigating, charged President Donald Trump in the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., in his 2020 election case, but after Trump was elected president, Smith sought to dismiss the case. Judge Tanya Chutkan granted that request. 

Smith’s case cost taxpayers more than $50 million. 

Smith did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday morning made a formal request to Israeli President Isaac Herzog to pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption and fraud charges.

Trump asked Herzog to consider fully pardoning Netanyahu in a letter that Herzog’s office shared. Trump wrote that Netanyahu has been a ‘formidable and decisive’ leader for Israel in a time of war and has led Israel ‘into a time of peace.’

‘Prime Minister Netanyahu has stood tall for Israel in the face of strong adversaries and long odds, and his attention cannot be unnecessarily diverted,’ reads the letter.

Trump wrote that while he ‘absolutely’ respects the independence of the Israeli judicial system, he believes the case against Netanyahu is a ‘political, unjustified prosecution.’

Netanyahu is currently standing trial on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust in three separate corruption cases. The trial, which began in 2020, marked the first time a sitting Israeli prime minister testified as a criminal defendant.

Trump wrote that ‘it is time to let Bibi unite Israel by pardoning him, and ending that lawfare once and for all.’

Herzog declined to take a position on the matter, with his office issuing its own statement that a presidential pardon request must go through the proper channels, which includes the person who wants a pardon making a formal request. 

The statement said that Herzog holds Trump in the ‘highest regard’ and ‘continues to express his deep appreciation’ for Trump’s support of Israel and his ‘tremendous’ role in the return of hostages from Gaza.

Trump previously urged Herzog to pardon Netanyahu during a speech in the Israeli Knesset last month.

Fox News’ Yonat Friling contributed to this report.

The end of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history is finally in sight, with the House of Representatives set to vote on a federal funding bill later Wednesday evening.

House lawmakers are set to take a procedural vote in the 5 p.m. hour on whether to allow debate on the measure. If the legislation survives, a final vote is expected in the 7 p.m. hour.

The government has been shut down for 43 days as Democrats and Republicans hotly debated the merits of the GOP’s initial federal funding bill, a short-term extension of fiscal year (FY) 2025 spending levels through Nov. 21.

The vast majority of Democrats are still against the legislation, including House Democratic leadership, but GOP lawmakers across several ideologically diverse factions have signaled confidence in a nearly unified Republican vote.

House Freedom Caucus Policy Chairman Chip Roy, R-Texas, said he heard no dissent on the bill from his band of fiscal hawks.

‘I’m not going to speak for everybody, but I think there’s general support. So you know, I’m unaware of any opposition of significance,’ he told reporters Tuesday night.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said, ‘Nothing’s ever easy around here. But, look, I didn’t notice any dissent … I think the votes will be there on our side.’

But with a razor-thin majority, House GOP leaders can only afford to lose two Republican votes at most to pass the bill without relying on any Democrats.

‘I’m very hopeful,’ House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told Fox News Digital when asked if Republicans had the votes to pass the bill. ‘I think you’re seeing just a few Democrats come to their senses. It should be a lot more.’

Meanwhile, the shutdown’s effects on the country have grown more severe by the day.

Many of the thousands of air traffic controllers and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents who had to work without pay were forced to take second jobs, causing nationwide flight delays and cancellations amid staffing shortages at the country’s busiest airports. Millions of Americans who rely on federal benefits were also left in limbo as funding for critical government programs ran close to drying out.

At the heart of the issue was Democratic leaders’ refusal to back any funding bill that did not also extend COVID-19 pandemic-era enhanced Obamacare subsidies that are set to expire at the end of this year. Democrats argued it was their best hope of preventing healthcare price hikes for Americans across the U.S.

Republicans agreed to hold conversations on reforming what they saw as a broken healthcare system, but they refused to pair any partisan priority with federal funding.

The initial bill passed the House on Sept. 19 but stalled in the Senate for weeks, when Democrats sank the bill more than a dozen times.

However, after weeks of stalemate and the clock running down on their Nov. 21 bill, a new compromise emerged that got support from eight Senate Democrats to carry it across the finish line.

The new legislation would extend FY 2025 federal funding levels through Jan. 30, to give negotiators more time to strike a longer-term deal for FY 2026.

It would also give lawmakers some headway with that mission, advancing legislation to fund the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration; the Department of Veterans Affairs and military construction; and the legislative branch.

In a victory for Democrats, the deal would also reverse federal layoffs conducted by the Trump administration in October, with those workers getting paid for the time they were off.

A side deal struck in the Senate also guaranteed Senate Democrats a vote on legislation extending the enhanced Obamacare subsidies. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., however, has made no such promise in the House.

If passed on Wednesday night, the legislation heads to President Donald Trump’s desk for a signature.

When asked about the bill on Tuesday, a White House official told Fox News Digital, ‘President Trump has wanted the government reopened since the first day Democrats shut it down. The action in the Senate is a positive development, and we look forward to seeing it progress.’

In 2015, when Donald Trump was running for the Republican nomination for president, a refrain that was often heard from his supporters and mocked by his detractors was, ‘He fights.’

It seemed empty and vacuous, but in fact, it represented a few core issues that GOP voters felt their party was ignoring, or at least not prioritizing. Today, it is the Democratic base that is demanding its party ‘fight.’ But fight for what?

Trump’s core issues, and those of what would become known as MAGA, were a bit obscure at first, but eventually became very clear: Secure the border, abandon globalism and bad trade deals, and fight the culture war.

What are the issues or policies that are animating today’s fighting spirit in the Democratic Party? There are three that are dominant.

The first issue can roughly be called redistribution of wealth. We should avoid using the term socialism here, because it is vague and toxic, and what Democrats are really talking about is the very purpose of the social safety net, from welfare to food stamps.

At least nominally, the position of the Democratic Party for half a century has been that welfare programs are a hand up, not a hand out. As John F. Kenndy put it, they are the rising tide that lifts all ships.

In practice, this has led to a permanent underclass that is funded by high-earning taxpayers, but Democrats have long refused to admit it. Democrat socialists have ripped off the Band-Aid. Soaking the rich to pay for the basic needs of the poor and working man is their proud new mantra.

It turns out, the likes of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani have Democratic voters with them on this about-face. In a recent Gallup poll, 66% of Democrats had a positive view of socialism, with only 42% saying the same about capitalism.

Former President Joe Biden used to whisper that billionaires should ‘pay their fair share.’ Today, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., shout from the rooftops that the rich should pay way more than their ‘fair share,’ and basically subsidize everyone else.

The second major issue that the democrat socialists have locked onto is Israel, and America’s relationship with and military funding of the Jewish state, something that even a decade ago the party supported as bedrock policy.

According to a Pew survey, since 2022, the percentage of Democrats with a negative view of Israel has gone from 53% to a staggering 69%, and the lean and hungry New Democrats know it.

Rep. Ro Khana, D-Calif., who has been quietly crafting a new vision for his party, recently posted a list of issues at the core of his mission. They included ‘Medicare-for-all,’ child care for $10 a day, housing, and then, right there at the bottom, ‘No bombs to Israel.’

Meanwhile, pro-Israel Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., has all but admitted there is ‘no room’ in the party for those on his side of the issue. That’s not good news for the political future of moderates like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

The third issue that is clearly firing up the Democratic base is immigration, and when I say they are fired up, I mean seemingly normal people leaping in front of the cars of federal authorities to keep them from deporting illegal alien criminals.

Take Mamdani’s acceptance speech in Brooklyn last week: ‘Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas,’ he said. ‘Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.’

The key words here are ‘who made this movement.’

Make no mistake, this new iteration of the Democratic Party will not only seek to give amnesty to every person illegally in the United States, they will open the border again, and their voters will cheer on the invasion.

It wasn’t just establishment Republicans who underestimated Trump’s appeal in 2015, it was the whole country. What we didn’t see then was that on his big three issues, the border, globalism and the culture war, he was tapping into a real popular zeitgeist.

Today, we are at a similar point, on redistribution of wealth, Israel and immigration, the democrat socialists have found popular policies among their base, and all the Chuck Schumers in the world can’t talk them out of it.

Just as Trump took over the GOP before anyone quite knew it, the democrat socialists have found the same fighting path to dominance among Democrats, and for the few moderates left, it already looks far too late to stop it.

Former first lady Michelle Obama revealed on a recent episode of her podcast that she was left infuriated by a moment on Air Force One in 2009 when she debated whether to wear Bermuda shorts while on vacation — which ultimately led to controversy. 

‘The fact that we had to spend time thinking about that kind of stuff in ways that my husband didn’t — it was really infuriating,’ Obama said during an episode on her podcast, ‘IMO With Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson,’ which she co-hosts with her brother. ‘Then an article, a negative article, still happened.’ 

The former first lady explained that in August 2009 she and the former president were set to depart Air Force One for a hike in the Grand Canyon while on their first vacation since the inauguration earlier that year. While she fretted over what attire would be appropriate for a first lady and not draw public criticism, Barack Obama did not need to put effort into thinking about his outfit, she recounted. 

‘It was 100 degrees,’ Michelle Obama remembered of the conversation. ‘Barack — I was like, ‘Well, what are you wearing?’ He was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna throw on some sneakers, I’m gonna take my jacket off and roll my sleeves up’ because that’s what men can do. White shirt, no collar, no tie. That was how he changed.’

Michelle Obama said she debated whether to wear hiking shorts or a dress before landing on wearing Bermuda shorts. 

‘I can’t wear hiking shorts there, and I can’t wear a dress to hike,’ she said. ‘That would be crazy. People would call me ‘disconnected’ and ‘un-American.’ I’m at the Grand Canyon in a tea-length dress with flats? I was like, ‘That’s not how people go to the Grand Canyon.”

‘I eventually opted for the thing that felt mostly me,’ Michelle Obama continued. ‘And it was the Bermuda shorts. Because if we’re going on a hike, this is how a normal person would go on a hike.’

The former first lady did face backlash for the attire, as pundits at the time criticized that a first lady wearing shorts while departing Air Force One was too casual, with outlets running headlines such as, ‘Who Wears Short Shorts? Michelle Obama,’ ‘First lady’s shorts draw some long, hard looks,’ and ‘Michelle Obama: The Shorts Heard Round the World.’

Michelle Obama said in 2013 that she would not wear shorts again on Air Force One after the 2009 outfit caused ‘a huge stink.’ She explained at the time that she made the more relaxed choice because ‘we’re on vacation.’

First lady Melania Trump also has faced backlash over her wardrobe attire, including in 2017 when she wore a baseball cap and jeans to visit Texas after Hurricane Harvey that was viewed by some critics as too casual, and again in 2018 when she wore a green jacket while on a trip to visit the border that read, ‘I really don’t care. Do u?’ 

Melania Trump later told the media she wore the jacket as a message to the liberal media and other critics: ‘I want to show them that I don’t care,’ she told ABC News in 2018. 

Fox News Digital reached out to Michelle Obama’s office Tuesday for additional comment on the matter but did not immediately receive a reply.