House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan urged the Justice Department on Wednesday night to seek dismissal with prejudice of every prior criminal prosecution against President Donald Trump, a move that would bar prosecutors from ever refiling the charges. The call came as newly obtained FBI closing documents revealed the bureau had ordered all evidence from its election-related investigation of Trump preserved until at least February 2030, two years after his second term ends.
Jordan's demand, reported by Just the News, targets cases that were dismissed without prejudice after Trump won the 2024 election, meaning they could theoretically be refiled once he leaves office. The Ohio Republican wants Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to close that door permanently.
The chairman did not mince words. Jordan told Just the News that Blanche should make clear to federal courts that the prosecutions are finished for good.
"When you think about what's it now been over 10 years? I mean, remember this all started when we learned here from your good reporting and other good work, that we've learned that the whole thing was a hoax from the beginning when they used the (Steele) dossier that was manufactured and paid for by the Clinton campaign and all that. So, yeah, it's probably time that this is all just ended."
Jordan called dismissal with prejudice "the right approach" and said Blanche should declare "this thing is done, over with. A-B see you later."
The distinction between dismissal with and without prejudice matters enormously. When Special Counsel Jack Smith sought to drop his January 6 related case against Trump following Trump's victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November 2024, he asked the court to dismiss without prejudice. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee, granted that request, pointing to the Office of Legal Counsel's longstanding position that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted by his own Justice Department.
That legal posture left the charges technically alive, dormant but available for a future administration to pick back up. Jordan wants that option eliminated.
The more striking development may be what the FBI's own paperwork shows about the bureau's posture after the case was supposedly closed. Internal FBI closing documents, emails and memos dating to early 2025, detail how agents and DOJ prosecutors handled the wind-down of the election-related investigation, code-named "Arctic Frost."
One key document, dated February 5, 2025, just a couple of weeks into Trump's second term, originated from the FBI's Washington Field Office CR-15 team. Its formal title: "Arctic Frost, Election Law Matters, Sensitive Investigative Matter." Its stated purpose: "To Document the Closing of Captioned Investigation."
The document's listed enclosures included a "Deputy Special Counsel Concurrence" and a "Retention of Evidence Approval." That retention order is where things get pointed. The FBI memo stated plainly that "this investigation is subject to a litigation hold and is on the freeze list; as a result, no evidence can be returned or destroyed and must be retained."
The evidence would be kept until at least February 1, 2030. The memo noted that the Special Counsel's Office concurred with the retention. An assistant special agent in charge approved the order "to retain all evidence notwithstanding closure," as required by the FBI's Field Evidence Management Policy Guide.
In plain terms: the FBI closed the case on paper but kept every piece of evidence locked down for half a decade, through the entirety of Trump's second term and beyond. That timeline has raised questions about whether the bureau was preserving the option for a future prosecution, even as it formally shut the investigation down.
The Arctic Frost closing document also contained language that read less like a neutral administrative filing and more like a prosecutorial summary. It stated that "the captioned FBI investigation was opened based on specific and articulable facts and circumstances that individuals affiliated with Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. (the 'Trump Campaign') engaged in activity that violated federal law."
It went further, asserting that "the investigation revealed that when Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office." The document described "various co-conspirators" and claimed Trump "launched a series of plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin."
The memo listed three alleged conspiracies: interference with the federal government's constitutional function of collecting and counting election results, obstruction of the congressional certification proceeding, and a conspiracy against the voting rights of millions of Americans. Previous reporting has explored how documents from Senator Grassley's investigation raised questions about coordination between Jack Smith's team and Obama-appointed judges during these same Trump investigations.
Because the closing document required the same level of approval needed to open the investigation, approval "up to and including the Director of the FBI", the filing effectively memorialized the prosecution's theory of the case inside an official FBI record, even as it purported to close the matter.
FBI Director Kash Patel did not treat the documents as routine. He told Just the News that the pre-Patel decision to keep evidence from the dismissed prosecution was wrong, abusive, and not normal FBI procedure. Patel framed the matter as part of a broader pattern of institutional misconduct.
"The American people deserve to know how this egregious weaponization of power to target political opponents and President Trump happened inside an institution meant to protect them."
Patel confirmed that the special FBI unit responsible for the case, the CR-15 squad at the Washington Field Office, has been disbanded.
"We shut down the weaponized CR-15 squad, and we are going to keep following the facts until there is full accountability. The FBI exists to protect the country, not to preserve political prosecutions for a future administration."
That last line speaks directly to the central concern raised by the evidence-retention order. If the case was truly closed, why freeze the evidence for five years? Patel's answer: the bureau under its prior leadership was keeping its options open for whoever might next occupy the Oval Office, or the attorney general's office.
The origins of the Arctic Frost investigation trace back through the upper ranks of the Biden-era Justice Department. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, and then-FBI Director Christopher Wray all signed off on the launch of the inquiry into Trump related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Garland himself stated that he "personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant" for the FBI's raid of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022.
The scope of the legal campaign against Trump has also drawn scrutiny from the president himself, who has accused Democratic leaders of election interference through politically motivated legal and institutional actions.
That these senior officials authorized both the opening and the investigative actions, and that the closing document required the same chain of approval, underscores how deeply embedded the Trump prosecutions were within the DOJ's command structure. This was not a rogue field office acting alone. The investigation carried the personal imprimatur of the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, and the FBI director.
Jordan's push for dismissal with prejudice would carry real legal weight. A without-prejudice dismissal is a pause button. A with-prejudice dismissal is a delete key. Once granted, the government cannot refile the same charges. Period.
The fact that Smith's original dismissal request specified "without prejudice", and that Chutkan granted it on those terms, means a future DOJ could theoretically reopen the case after Trump leaves office. The evidence-retention order, with its February 2030 expiration, fits neatly into that timeline. Trump's second term ends in January 2029. The evidence freeze runs thirteen months past that date.
Whether a future administration would actually attempt to refile is an open question. But the legal architecture to do so remains intact, and that is precisely what Jordan wants dismantled. The broader pattern of political confrontation between the Trump administration and its opponents has played out across multiple fronts, including Trump's accusations that House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has engaged in incitement.
Several questions remain unresolved. Jordan did not specify which federal courts the DOJ should petition for with-prejudice dismissals. The FBI documents do not carry a docket or case number for the Arctic Frost matter. And the exact filing date of Smith's original dismissal request is not publicly pinpointed.
It is also unclear whether Blanche has signaled any willingness to pursue Jordan's request. The acting attorney general has not been quoted responding to the chairman's call. Former FBI officials such as James Comey, who recently surrendered to federal authorities on separate charges, have been drawn into the broader accountability debate around the FBI's handling of Trump-related matters.
What is clear from the documents is that the FBI, even as it closed the Arctic Frost investigation in early 2025, built a record that preserved both the prosecution's factual theory and the physical evidence, and did so with the explicit concurrence of the Special Counsel's Office. The closing memo did not read like a clean break. It read like a bookmark.
Jordan's argument is straightforward: if the prosecutions were politically motivated from the start, and the evidence was frozen to keep them viable for a future administration, then the only honest resolution is permanent dismissal. Anything less leaves the legal infrastructure of what Jordan calls a decade-long campaign sitting on a shelf, waiting for the next attorney general willing to dust it off.
When the government closes a case but keeps the ammunition locked and loaded for five more years, it tells you everything about what "closed" really means.