(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has exposed an obscure “lawfare activist” behind the Jan. 6 investigation into President Donald Trump—complete with deep ties to both the Biden Justice Department and the FBI.
Soumya Dayananda, a leftist attorney, served as the senior counsel for the House Select Jan. 6 Committee. She has publicly boasted that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump mirrors her work for the committee.
Even more brazenly, Dayananda is married to FBI agent Wayne Jacobs, who ran the bureau’s D.C. criminal division—and whose role also intersects with the Trump “lawfare.”
During Jacobs’s tenure, the FBI launched criminal probes into Jan. 6 participants and Trump himself, all while turning a blind eye to the influence-peddling tied to President Joe Biden.
Newly unearthed emails even show former FBI agent Timothy Thibault copying Jacobs on messages naming Trump as a target. This, the Oversight Project says, raises fresh questions about conflict of interest.
On PBS, Dayananda even boasted of helping Jack Smith target Trump (Operation “Arctic Frost”) and admitted creating literal propaganda to shape public opinion against Trump. She's also a democratic donor… pic.twitter.com/avjt0gKFiy
— Oversight Project (@ItsYourGov) May 13, 2025
During an interview on PBS’s Frontlines, Dayananda made it clear she had heavily influenced the Smith indictment against Trump.
“I rushed home to watch Jack Smith’s press conference and read the indictment word for word, and was really impressed to see the work that myself and our colleagues had put together, the fact-gathering, kind of repackaged in the form of this indictment, with the conspiracy laid out.”
“All these conspiracies that were laid out” by Smith were “featured in the summer hearings,” Dayananda told PBS. “There was some new information, of course, but largely it reflected the work that was in the [Jan. 6] report and that much of the public had learned already during the hearings.”
The Oversight Project also called out Dayananda’s partisan pedigree. She is a Democratic donor who has given cash to former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Kamala Harris.
She once represented Hunter Biden’s Chinese business partner pro bono “to protect the Bidens.”
These revelations come as the Trump administration moves swiftly to undo the Biden administration’s weaponization of the federal government to attack political opponents.
