Republican Senator Crows Latest Jack Smith Claim a ‘Bigger Scandal Than Watergate’

Sean James

Oct 5th, 2026, 11:32 am

Move over, Richard Nixon.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) was so disgusted with a new report ex-special prosecutor Jack Smith covertly tracked the phone calls and emails White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles sent in 2024, while she was co-chairing President Donald Trump’s campaign, that he said it was a “bigger scandal than Watergate.”

Lee said Smith’s actions should go down in history as a disgrace in a Monday morning X post.

“Again: this is objectively a bigger scandal than Watergate,” Lee posted. “The main difference is that the Democrat establishment & media happily look the other way when the DOJ is used to spy upon Donald Trump’s campaign chief, with no regard for the dangerous precedent set.”

His remarks were added to a post from The Daily Signal, which reported Smith “monitored” Wiles and her communications with five journalists from outlets like CNN and the Washington Post; Smith also tracked the communications she had with 21 defense attorneys and a number of political advisers, the report said.

“Smith’s team obtained the information through what is called a pen register, sometimes called a trap-and-trace device,” the report explained. “This does not access the content of conversations. Rather, it’s a surveillance tool that records metadata, such as the numbers called and the times of the calls.”

Smith started tracking Wiles in early 2023, according to the report.

The Daily Signal’s scoop comes a week after Smith was grilled by Congress over his probes into Trump.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) went off on himat one point, accusing Smith of leading “disgraceful” investigations which would go down in history as the “most egregious abuse of power in the history of the Department of Justice.”

The Texas conservative, as the ex-prosecutor sat across from him during his congressional testimony in Washington, D.C., claimed Smith’s “witch hunt” against Trump and other Republicans was driven by a crazed obsession with bringing down his political enemies. He also made a Nixon reference.

“Let me say congratulations, because you have succeeded where Richard Nixon failed, which is weaponizing the Department of Justice to go after your political opponents,” Cruz said. “Congratulations.”

Smith didn’t let the hearing wreck his week, though. He was spotted donning his “No Kings” shirt at the Power to the People Festival in Maryland on Saturday, where Foo Fighters leader Dave Grohlgave him a shoutout while onstage.

“This one goes out to my new friend Jack!” Grohl yelped, as he started playing “My Hero.”

https://www.mediaite.com/politics/republican-senator-crows-latest-jack-smith-claim-a-bigger-scandal-than-watergate/

THEY’RE TERRIFIED: Marc Elias Cheers NAACP Lawsuit Demanding Records on Trump DOJ’s Plan to Send Roughly 1,000 Election Monitors to the Polls — and Gets BLASTED. 1/2

By Jim Hᴏft Oct. 6, 2026 8:00 am

Democrat super-lawyerMarc Eliasrushed to social media Mondayto celebrate a new National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawsuitaimed at the Trump Justice Department’s plan to put roughly 1,000 federal election monitors at polling places for the November 3 midterms. Americans immediately told him what they thought of it.

It can be recalled that Assistant Attorney General HarmeetDhillon has called the initiative the largest DOJ election-observer effort in historyand said the department is close to the 1,000 mark, drawn from department lawyers and other trained legal staff.

That is well above the roughly 289 monitors sent in the 2022 midterms and the 714 sent in the 2024 presidential election. She has also said monitors already covered 11 states and hundreds of polling locations during this year’s primaries.

Attorney General Todd Blanche already knocked down the armed-agent scare story.

On Fox News Sunday, Shannon Bream asked whether the monitors would be armed federal agents. Blanche’s answer: “Completely false. They’re going to be election monitorsas they are every single time.”

He said DOJ has monitored elections since the 1960s, that the Trump administration is doing what “every single administration has done,” and that the monitors “are not going to Republican states.

They’re not going to Democrat states.They’re going to every stateto make sure that our elections are carried out legally, fairly, and appropriately.”

That has not stopped the panic machine.

Elias, founder of Democracy Docket and chair of the Elias Law Group, posted: “BREAKING: The NAACP sued the Trump administration, seeking records about its plan to deploy roughly 1,000 federal personnelto polling places during the 2026 midterms,” linking to his own outlet’s write-up.

The case is not an order stopping the monitors. It is a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, NAACP v. Dhillon, filed October 2 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The defendant is Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, sued in her official capacity as head of the Civil Rights Division.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/10/theyre-terrified-marc-elias-cheers-naacp-lawsuit-demanding/

>>25112109

2/2

According to Democracy Docket,the NAACP wants a judge to force the Civil Rights Division to turn over records before Election Day: the legal authority for the program, internal legal analysis, complaints used to justify deployments, the jurisdictions selected for November, training materials, monitor qualifications, whether state and local officials consented, and whether personnel from the FBI, U.S. Marshals, DHS, or ICE would take part. The group filed the underlying FOIA request on September 1.

“This unprecedented deploymentof federal officials stands to jeopardize the election and interfere with the right of voters to participate in the election free from intimidation,” the NAACP wrote.

“Courts have recognized that unnecessary law enforcement and government presence at polling sites can cause fear, create confusion, impose burdens on election officials, and have a chilling or coercive effect on the electorate.”

The replies did not buy it.

Under Elias’s post,the comments turned fast.

“This is a pathetic lawsuit. What’s their issue with having feds at polling places?” wrote @FurioGiunta10.

“Hahah, ya’ll want to know where the election monitors are going so you can cheat at other polling locations. Classic! Tick Tock!” wrote @ShrinkGov.

“It’s outrageous if Trump is really going to have 1,000 I.C.E. agents at polling places on election day. It should be 20,000 minimum,” wrote @Jonnyinmd.

“Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Think back to when the black panthers were deployed,” wrote @JamesReedman1.

“I guess neither Elias nor the NAACP understand the law. It is perfectly legal for unarmed federal agents to be near polling places as long as they are not openly intimidating people,” wrote @Concernedf0rUSA.

“They may get the records after the election, but there’s no real point to the lawsuit other than a distraction from the real problems with the election. Remember kiddies it’s only ‘free and fair’ if the dems win,” wrote @magadog2020.

Others kept it shorter:“That’s because you Democrats like to cheat. WE KNOW.” And: “Bring your ID.”

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/10/theyre-terrified-marc-elias-cheers-naacp-lawsuit-demanding/

Entire Federal Bench in Middle Tennessee Recuses From Marsha Blackburn’s Lawsuit Against Jack Smith — Sixth Circuit to Bring in Outside Judge

By Jim Hᴏft Oct. 6, 2026

Every sitting district judge in the Middle District of Tennessee has stepped off Senator Marsha Blackburn’s civil rights lawsuit against former Special Counsel Jack Smith,forcing the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to designate an outside judge to hear the case.

Chief Judge William L. Campbell, Jr. signed the one-page order on October 5, 2026, in Blackburn v. Smith. The order states, in full: “All District Judges of the Middle District of Tennessee have recused in this matter.

As such, a District Judge from outside the District will be designated by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. When the designation is made, the case will be reassigned.”

The court gave no reason. Why are these judges running for the hills?

Smith has already waived service. That waiver was filed the same morning the full-bench recusal order dropped.

The docket shows the judges did not all leave at once. An individual recusal order was entered on October 2. By Monday afternoon, Campbell certified that the entire district bench was out. The case now sits with the clerk until the Sixth Circuit picks a judge from somewhere else in the circuit.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Senator Blackburn (R-TN) dropped a massive lawsuit in late September demanding justice after it was revealed that Jack Smith’s out-of-control, partisan witch-hunt secretly obtained her private cell phone records from Verizon.

Smith and his team of far-left thugs didn’t just target President Trump, they obtained secret non-disclosure orders to hide the fact that they were spying on a sitting U.S. Senator, effectively stripping her of her constitutional Speech or Debate Clause protections.

“This lawsuit is solely about holding Mr. Smith accountable and ensuring that our nation’s justice system can never again be weaponized against the American people,” Blackburn told Fox News Digital.

“Through his Arctic Frost witch-hunt that targeted conservatives across America and even the president of the United States, Jack Smith perpetrated one of the worst abuses of government power in our nation’s history.”

All of this was done by a rogue operator who was never lawfully nominated by the President or confirmed by the U.S. Senate to wield such terrifying power.

When Smith’s goons went to a federal judge in D.C. to get the nondisclosure order, they reportedly concealed the fact that the subpoena targeted a Republican member of Congress. It is one of the most shocking abuses of power in American history.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/10/entire-federal-bench-middle-tennessee-recuses-marsha-blackburns/

This is proof, judges are cowards and are afraid of getting dragged into meaningful decisions. Are they are afraid of Jack Smith? Weird really!

Supreme Court Rejects Radical Far-Left PA Judge’s Appeal After He Was Suspended For Hyper-Partisan Pro-Biden Facebook Posts

By Jim Hᴏft Oct. 6, 2026 9:1

The U.S. Supreme Court on Mondayrefused to hear former Philadelphia Judge Mark B. Cohen’s last-ditch bid to undo his suspensionfor turning a public Facebook page, one that identified him as a sitting judge and showed him in his robes,into a Democrat cheering section for Joe Biden, Josh Shapiro, and the party line.

The justices denied certiorari without comment. Cohen, a Democrat who spent more than four decades in the Pennsylvania House before winning a Court of Common Pleas seat in 2018,had asked the high court to rule that the First Amendment shielded dozens of partisan posts he made while on the bench. It did not.

As The Hill reported,Pennsylvania’s judicial discipline system suspended him in 2024 over posts praising Democrats, including Biden and Gov. Josh Shapiro, and pushing policies such as raising the minimum wage.

That suspension was not a close call, and it was not a surprise.

The Judicial Conduct Boardcharged Cohen over scores of postson a page that advertised his status as a Family Division judge.

The record, laid out in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s January 21, 2026, opinion and in the board’s filings, shows a longtime Democratic operative who never really left the campaign.

He called Biden an excellent president. He boosted Shapiro. He backed Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.

He criticized Republicans, including then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and took shots at the National Rifle Association.

He argued for more domestic spending and less military spending. He implicitly endorsed a congressional candidate and touted his own legislative record as a Democrat.The board called it what it was: “partisan cheerleading.”

He was warned. He kept posting. When someone on Facebook asked who was behind the complaint, Cohen answered that it was “Conservative people who want judges to be scared of their own shadow and completely silent on issues of societal improvements and social justice.”

The Court of Judicial Discipline later noted that no other case in its history involved that kind of defiance after a decision. On October 7, 2024, it suspended him without pay through the end of his term.

Pennsylvania law forced him off the bench anyway on December 31, 2024, when he hit the mandatory retirement age of 75.

Cohen appealed. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed in an opinion by Justice Kevin Dougherty. The court drew a line the U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized for judicial candidates, strict scrutiny under Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, and refused to hand the same protection to a sitting judge who was not running.

Outside a campaign, the court said,the state’s interest in an independent, impartial judiciary is weighed against the judge’s desire to speak. Here, the Commonwealth won.

“Here, we hold the Commonwealth’s interests in preserving the judiciary’s reputation for impartiality outweighed Judge Cohen’s interests, as a sitting judgewho was not a candidate for judicial office, in publicly advocating for the Democratic Party on Facebook and espousing his partisan political views,” Dougherty wrote.

Cohen’s lawyers at DLA Piper told the U.S. Supreme Court its “guidance is sorely needed” and warned of a chilling effect. The Judicial Conduct Board, represented by Stanford Law School’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, saidthere is no precedent that lets a sitting judge use the office as a party microphone.

Four votes were required to take the case. Cohen did not get them. The Epoch Times noted the Court gave no explanation, which is standard on a cert denial.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/10/supreme-court-rejects-radical-far-left-pa-judges/

(The guy sounds insane!)

EXCLUSIVE: Video Shows Abdul El-Sayed Stating He Has ‘Dual Citizenship’ in Egypt and US

The Democrat made the remarks, revealed here for the first time, onstage at a 2016 medical conference

Chuck Ross

October 5, 2026

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told a Detroit audience in 2016 that he has "dual citizenship" in the United States and Egypt, according to previously unreported video. It's the second time he's been documented making the claim, even though his campaign now claims he was never a dual citizen.

El-Sayed made the remark about his dual citizenship onstage at a GlobeMed conference in Detroit, where the far-left Democrat served as the city's health director at the time.

"I carry dual citizenship, and I grew up spending most of my summers in another country where I understood what it meant not to have the right to self-govern," said El-Sayed, whose parents emigrated from Egypt to the Detroit area in 1978.

El-Sayed went on to tell a story, one he still tells on the campaign trail a decade later,that he was questioned by Egyptian police during one of those summer visits for publicly cursing Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president at the time.

The newly revealed 2016 video marks at least the second time El-Sayed has publicly claimed to have Egyptian status. His academic résumé stated in 2014 that he was a citizen of the United States and Egypt, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported.

El-Sayed's campaign told the Free Beacon, which reported in January on the dual citizenship claim made on his résumé, that El-Sayed was mistaken about his citizenship status.

"Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been," campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Free Beacon. Richner said that El-Sayed was "told as a child that his grandfather had pursued Egyptian citizenship on his behalf, for which he was eligible due to his parents being born in Egypt." But that person, whom the campaign has not identified, was wrong, according to Richner.

"This was an error based on what he was told by family members secondhand," said Richner. "When he tried to verify this later on in life, he and his family were unable to find any documentation to verify this claim."

In 2014, El-Sayed was working as a public health scholar,and false statements on a résumé, including ones about ethnic identity, are considered a grave offense in academia.

El-Sayed's campaign did not respond to questions about his 2016 statement. The Democrat has repeatedly attacked his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, for owning a home in Florida.

Born in Michigan in 1984, El-Sayed has said his father, an engineering professor at Eastern Michigan University,left Egypt to pursue his academic studies and because he was a "democracy agitator" who had run afoul of Egyptian authorities.

Abdul El-Sayed Claimed Dual Citizenship in Egypt and US

0:17

https://youtu.be/A6fZEL1QM8o

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/exclusive-video-shows-abdul-el-sayed-stating-he-has-dual-citizenship-in-egypt-and-us/

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Icelandic Foreign Minister Þorgerður Katrín Gunnarsdóttir Hold a Joint Press Availability – Video and Transcript

October 6, 2026 | Sundance |

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Iceland Foreign Minister Gunnardottir hold a press conference, following bilateral discussions between the U.S. delegation and Iceland. The video and transcript are below:

Secretary Rubio's joint press availability with Icelandic Foreign Minister Gunnarsdóttir

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U.S. Department of State

24:26

(https://youtu.be/McTVL9C–eM

[Transcript] – FOREIGN MINISTER GUNNARSDÓTTIR: (In Icelandic.) Thank you all for being here. I will not continue in Icelandic, my dear Marco, and thank you especially for visiting Iceland. I think that demonstrates also very well our close connections and good relationship. And it has actually been, from my point of view, a productive morning. I would say so. We started, as you know, at Hofdi House, where we first had the opportunity to hear about the historic summit back almost 40 years ago between President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, and I hope you enjoyed our meeting in Hofdi. I thought there’s a kind of special atmosphere there.

The Secretary and I, then we had an excellent bilateral meeting at Hofdi, and now, just now, we concluded a very good meeting with – here in Safnahusid with our prime minister here in Iceland, Kristrún Frostadóttir. I would say throughout our discussions, they have been good and it has been very clear that Iceland and U.S., the United States of America, we enjoy a very good and strong and also enduring friendship. We share a long history. The U.S. was – as we have already mentioned, the U.S. was the first country to recognize the Republic of Iceland back in 1944. We are both founding members of NATO 1949, and of course we have the valuable bilateral Defense Agreement between our two countries since 1951.

And we are working closely together every day here in Iceland, especially to safeguard the security of the High North, North Atlantic, and the Arctic. For us, being a credible and responsible ally, we take this role very seriously here in Iceland, especially when it comes to the U.S. and the whole of NATO. And this is also very much and strongly reflected in our new policy – and actually the first one – policy and defense and security. It also strongly emphasizes the very important relationship through defense and security with the U.S.

With Iceland and the U.S. both being Arctic nations, the Secretary and I, we fully agreed on the need to work together to ensure a safe and secure Arctic region. And I especially want to commend you, Marco, on how you have taken such a strong initiative to – in making the A7, Arctic 7 group, even more effective than it has been before. And that matters for us here in Iceland a lot.

And we also discussed the agreement that has been found between the U.S., Greenland, and Denmark, and that is also hugely important for the region that we got this good agreement on Greenland.

As we discussed also in both our meetings now today, there are ample opportunities to deepen our economic and investment relations even further – for instance, in geothermal energy. We discussed data centers, pharmaceuticals, as well as digital and other infrastructure. And we also talked about the challenging global context, which is on our minds as Russia full-scale invasion in Ukraine – very brutal, very relentless. And we touched on the dire situation in the Middle East and also we discussed our relations to China.

But above all, the Secretary and I, we had productive and constructive discussions, conversation, and I think the message is very clear. We are allies, we are friends, and we will continue working very closely to strengthen and deepen our good relationship.

So over to you, dear Marco….

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2026/10/06/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-and-icelandic-foreign-minister-thorgerdur-katrin-gunnarsdottir-hold-a-joint-press-availability-video-and-transcript/#more-287658