Jack Smith lashes out at Republicans at public hearing
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WASHINGTON – Jack Smith does not regret bringing criminal charges against President Donald Trump, the former special counsel told lawmakers Thursday.
“President Trump was impeached because the evidence established that he intentionally violated the law, the very laws he swore to uphold,” Smith said in his opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee.
Smith secured two grand jury indictments against Trump over his plans to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election and his hoarding of classified documents after the end of his first term as president.
Since the Justice Department has a policy against prosecuting a sitting president, the cases disappeared after Trump returned to the White House, and Smith never had the opportunity to put Trump on trial. Thursday’s hearing was Smith’s first chance to defend his work in public and confront some of the Republicans who have spent years vilifying him for prosecuting some of the most obvious crimes in American history.
“Democrats have been going after President Trump for a decade, and the country should never forget what they did,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said in his opening statement, in which he alleged that Smith used backdoor prosecutorial means in a purely political quest to prevent Trump from returning to the White House.
But while Smith said he was eager to correct “false and misleading narratives” about his work, he spoke quietly and avoided arguing with lawmakers. The most dramatic moment of the day came during a break in the hearing when two audience members nearly got into a fight, a moment that was captured from multiple angles by C-SPAN cameras.
via News
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the committee’s top Democrat, said Republicans would only make fools of themselves by attacking Smith.
“They will only be stroking the wounded ego of the convicted, illegal, twice impeached and convicted criminal president,” Raskin said, “who not only unleashed a mob against Congress and his own vice president, but has now pardoned and released into our communities hundreds of extremists, insurrectionists and criminals who beat police officers and who have proceeded to commit dozens more crimes against the American people since they were pardoned.”
With four police officers who fought the Trump mob on January 6, 2021, sitting behind Smith in the courtroom, the former special counsel spoke quietly and seemed determined to keep his testimony low-key.
“Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the legal transfer of power,” Smith said. “After leaving office in January 2021, President Trump illegally stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after leaving office, and repeatedly sought to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”
Republicans asked a series of questions about relatively trivial parts of Smith’s case against Trump and sometimes asked about things that were only tangentially related.
Jordan, for example, asked Smith about Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide who told the House committee on Jan. 6 that she had heard secondhand that Trump was so angry that his security team would not take him to the Capitol that day, that she lunged at his driver. Smith said he had not confirmed his testimony, which has been disputed, but that he had understood it to be secondhand. He said he had not decided before the case was dismissed whether he would call her as a witness.
“That says it all,” Jordan said. “That’s the extent to which the left and the Democrats were willing to go to get President Trump: to put someone on the witness stand who everyone knows is making it up.”
The case against Trump relied heavily on direct testimony from dozens of Republicans, including several who said they themselves had told Trump that he had lost the 2020 election. The controversial anecdote about the driver was not part of it.
Another major Republican issue Thursday was Smith’s decision to obtain “toll logs” that reflect the incoming and outgoing calls of several Republican members of Congress. Republicans have expressed outrage over the phone records, which did not include the actual content of their conversations, claiming they constituted a violation of the constitutional separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch.
Smith said he had requested the records, without notifying lawmakers, in accordance with Justice Department policy. He acknowledged the policy the department changed in December 2024.
“Do you know why everyone knows it’s wrong? Because the public integrity section of the Department of Justice has changed their policy,” Jordan said.
The only drawback? The department changed its policy after an internal watchdog found that the first Trump administration had obtained lawmakers’ phone records as part of an investigation into leaks to the media.
In response to a question from Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), Smith explained that the phone data helped corroborate part of his case about how Trump used the Capitol riot to try to delay lawmakers in certifying his loss.
“We had evidence that the president had directed Rudy Giuliani, one of his accomplices, to contact members of Congress to try to further delay the proceedings and exploit the violence that occurred at the Capitol,” Smith said. “We had evidence that those calls had occurred. We wanted to get more evidence of it, to corroborate it for the trial.”