Telecom executives didn’t give satisfactory answers to senators when asked about assisting former special counsel Jack Smith’s team in scooping up phone data of members of Congress. 

Lawyers for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon testified on Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law about why they willingly cooperated with investigators’ demands, without notifying the Republican senators targeted.

Smith’s team gathered the toll data as part of his investigation into Donald Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election outcome, an operation dubbed “Arctic Frost.”

The Justice Department gained a nondisclosure order for the subpoena, meaning the members of Congress did not have to be notified that their phone records were being collected for the investigation.

Late last year, Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released Smith’s subpoenas issued in 2023.

Smith’s subpoenas, directed at 34 individuals and 163 organizations, sought broad information, including the communications of several Republican senators, conservative organizations, and multiple individuals supporting Trump’s 2020 reelection. 

Here are four key takeaways from the........

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