Before Jack Smith became the main attack dog against Donald Trump, and long before congressional investigation uncovered his massive campaign against hundreds of Republican leaders and organizations, there was evidence of his prosecutorial misconduct — and Lindsey Graham reportedly looked the other way.
Former Rep. Rick Renzi (R-Ariz.) was convicted on bribery and extortion charges, to which he pleaded “not guilty,” and was later given a full presidential pardon by President Donald Trump. A 2019 complaint and request for investigation filed on Renzi’s behalf by respected legal firm Mayer Brown provided evidence of prosecutorial misconduct by Jack Smith and David Harbach — the same team that subsequently went after Trump — including via incentives for false testimony. Renzi told PJ Media that he and Mayer Brown attempted to bring that 2019 report to Graham‘s attention, but found his office filled with staff on loan from the Justice Department and friendly with Smith. PJ Media subsequently published the allegations in 2023, spurring Trump to label Smith “deranged.”
Yet now, more than five years after evidence of Smith’s wrongdoing was brought to his attention, Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has joined a group of fellow Republican senators in referring Jack Smith to the DOJ for prosecutorial misconduct. Why? Because Smith spied on Graham too. Could Graham have helped prevent Smith’s extensive spying on Republican leaders had he taken action in 2019?
Renzi told PJ Media, “April 2019, [the] official Inspector general complaint filed on my behalf by the [then] 12th largest law firm in America, Mayer Brown. That eventually gets swept under the rug and buried by Michael Horowitz and the deep state.” Horowitz was appointed under Barack Obama and now works for the Federal Reserve.
“That Inspector General complaint detailed how Jack Smith had used a witness payoff scheme in order to change the testimony of the key witness in my case, had withheld exculpatory evidence, had wiretapped my attorneys illegally 41 times, and then Jack Smith defended those illegal wiretaps to the judge, in my case,” Renzi went on.
Following the disappointment with Horowitz and the DOJ, Renzi said, he and another congressman took that complaint to Graham, who was then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “He has the greatest amount of power over the Department of Justice, and he has the ability to engage in some accountability” in that position, Renzi emphasized.
Graham, who agreed to a meeting Renzi told me, “says he's going to be in the meeting, and the Senate Judiciary Committee staff is going to attend. At the last minute, he ducks out of the meeting and just has his Senate Judiciary staff sitting in with myself, another congressman, my Mayer Brown attorney, and another attorney —two attorneys, and two former congressmen.”
Renzi explained, “As we walk into the meeting and sit down with the staff, ... one of the staffers is from on loan from the FBI, and two of the staffers are on loan from the Department of Justice. And one of the female staffers says, ‘Yeah, I know Jack Smith, and I work with David Harbach’. David Harbach is the attorney that Jack Smith used to hit President Trump in the Mar-a-lago case.”
Jack Smith, Renzi said, “doesn't argue cases. He gets up in front of the microphone and beats his chest and brags, but he doesn't …do the actual work in the courtroom. He's a little bit of a nervous Nellie, actually, when you see him in the courtroom. He was in the courtroom in my case, he was whispering the ear of Harbach, who, after my case, was promoted and went to work for James Comey.”
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Therefore, between “Jack Smith, who came up through the Department of Justice and became Eric Holder and Barack Obama's hit man,” and David Harbach, “who came up from the Department of Justice and became James Comey's hitman,” you have a dynamic duo of weaponized justice. Renzi stated, “And these two guys were in my case, committed prosecutorial misconduct, were sanctioned by the judge, and we filed a 190 page Inspector General complaint.… We then took it to the Senate Judiciary Committee, thinking that Lindsay Graham would do something.”
The allegations were all there back in 2019. “We told them Jack Smith was corrupt. We told them David Harbach was corrupt,” Renzi said. “We told them they had wiretapped my attorneys 41 times, that they had lied to the judge, that they had covered it up, they had withheld exculpatory evidence. [But] Lindsay Graham's staff was filled with DOJ employees on loan to his Senate Judiciary staff so that he could save on his staff budget, and he was nothing more than their pawn.”
Renzi says he is disgusted by Graham’s hypocrisy in now “claiming the victimhood” on TV and press conferences, “claiming how outraged he is that Jack Smith wiretapped him when [Smith] looked into his phone log [and] tried to take down the Republican Party. It's an absolute hypocritical joke. It's way past the pale of his normal RINO, liberal, fake Republican fraud that he is. This is beyond the pale, because less than five years ago, we told him, we told his staff, [that[ Jack Smith was corrupt,” Renzi said. “We told him he wiretapped my attorneys illegally. We told him he engaged in prosecutorial misconduct and crimes against me. And they laughed it off because [the staff] were all his friends. They were all friends of Jack Smith.”
Every American should be unnerved by what Jack Smith did to me and my Republican colleagues. pic.twitter.com/AibXDwvhop
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) October 8, 2025
According to Renzi, the practice of congressmen having staff on loan from the DOJ is far too common. He says Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) “also had a DOJ employee working for him as the House Judiciary Chairman. So the foxes are in the henhouse.” Renzi believes it is unjust for American taxpayer dollars “to be spent on hiring staffers who are trying to hold the Department of Justice accountable only to have the Department of Justice [fill] those particular offices with employees on loan. You see, that way they control the accountabilities, control the bottleneck.”
If this is true, Graham appears to have been hoisted with his own petard, the victim of the very same misconduct that he himself overlooked years ago.
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