Jack Smith, the former special counsel who filed indictments against U.S. President Donald Trump in two separate cases that never went to trial, condemned “false and misleading narratives” in his first public congressional testimony regarding his investigation.
Smith was appointed by the U.S. Justice Department to take over two pre-existing investigations of Trump once he declared his 2024 candidacy for president. But despite that significant post, the former prosecutor has made relatively few public comments outside of legal filings until Thursday.
“President Trump was charged because the evidence established that he willfully broke the very laws that he took an oath to uphold,” Smith told the House judiciary committee.
“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so, regardless of whether that president was a Democrat or a Republican.”
Smith and his team eventually indicted Trump on charges of conspiring to undo the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden and of willfully retaining classified documents into 2023, several of them top secret, at his Florida estate.
Trump, for his part, has hurled a string of epithets at Smith, who worked in the federal government in the past in both Republican and Democratic administrations, calling him a “Radical left Marxist prosecutor” and a “sick son of a bitch” at the White House on Tuesday.
Earlier this month, Trump and the White House issued an alternate history of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, the culmination of weeks of his election protestations.
“Our assessment of the evidence is that he is the person most responsible for what happened on Jan. 6,” Smith said in response to a question from Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, who slammed Republican lawmakers for theatrics and trying to smear the former special counsel.
Republicans were prepared to testify: Smith
Smith is facing an Office of Special Counsel probe, just as several officials who have angered Trump in the past have faced indictments or investigations just one year into his second presidency, including former FBI director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump on Thursday called for Smith to be “prosecuted for his actions,” saying on social media without providing evidence that Smith has committed “large scale perjury.” Trump said his comments were based on Smith’s testimony.
During that testimony, Smith said he believed that Trump’s Justice Department will find some way to indict him.
Donald Trump engaged in an ‘unprecedented criminal effort’ to ‘unlawfully retain power’ after losing the 2020 election, special counsel Jack Smith said in a report published by the U.S. Justice Department.
Republican lawmakers sought to discredit Smith’s investigation as an abuse of the legal system and symptom of a weaponized Justice Department under Biden.
“It was always about politics,” Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chair of the House’s judiciary committee, said at the start of the hearing. “To get Donald Trump, they were willing to do just about anything.”
But Smith said he was never pressured to indict Trump by the White House or then-attorney general Merrick Garland in the Biden administration.
As with closed-door testimomy before the same committee last month, Smith said that if the election case went to trial, prosecutors were prepared to call to testify several staunch Republicans at the federal and state level who wanted Trump to win but nevertheless said he was repeatedly told that he lost to Biden.
Former attorney general William Barr previously told a congressional committee he advised Trump that his claims of fraud were “bullshit.”
Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges and has repeatedly argued the charges were improperly aimed at damaging his 2024 campaign.
Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting a sitting president, and a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court decision — which came down as Smith’s team was preparing its case — severely curtailed what activities a president could be investigated for.
The Trump administration has also fired dozens of Justice Department lawyers, FBI agents and staffers who were assigned to work on the investigations, a move Smith condemned.
“In my opinion, these people are the best of public servants, our country owes them a debt of gratitude, and we are all less safe because many of these experienced and dedicated law enforcement professionals have been fired,” he said.
Grilled on getting Republican phone records
Smith faced several questions from Republican lawmakers about his team’s subpoenas of phone records, approved by a judge, belonging to more than half a dozen Republican members of Congress who were in touch with the president on the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021.
The records contained data about the participants on the calls and how long they lasted but not their contents. The prosecutor said that lawful Justice Department procedures were followed in making the requests.
Democrats have defended the investigation tactic, saying the records were necessary to examine Trump’s efforts to pressure Republican lawmakers to block certification of the election.
“You never in an investigation tell them, ‘Hey, dude, we’re about to get your phone records,'” said Democrat Ted Lieu of California, a former federal prosecutor. “Of course you wouldn’t tell them. What the Republicans are saying today is just idiotic.”
Despite Trump’s denials, judges across the country — including some he appointed to the bench — set aside dozens of legal challenges filed by the Trump campaign and its various surrogates to prevent Biden’s wins in key battleground states in 2020. Recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states where Trump disputed his loss all affirmed Biden’s victory.
There has never been a coherent explanation among Trump and those who deny Biden won as to how the vote total for the presidential race alone was corrupted while the hundreds of congressional, gubernatorial and myriad other races that were on 2020 ballots were unaffected or contested without incident.
Trump and some of his Republican allies have excoriated the use of expanded mail-in voting in 2020, a time before a vaccine for COVID-19 was widely available, leading to 43 per cent of total votes being cast by mail that year. But the rules did not favour a particular candidate, and Trump won a 2024 election in which it was been estimated that nearly one in three Americans voted by mail, as well as a 2016 election in which more than 20 per cent of votes were cast by mail.
Smith did not get into specific details of the classified documents case — considered by many legal analysts to be the most threatening of the four criminal indictments Trump once faced — as there’s a raging court battle still playing out on whether his report regarding his team’s findings in that case can even be made public.
Read Jack Smith’s closed-door testimony in December:
