Former special counsel Jack Smith invested time and effort into advocating for the public to see his testimony last week before the House Judiciary Committee, but to no avail: The panel’s far-right chair, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, rejected calls for transparency, preferring secrecy to sunlight.
The prosecutor isn’t letting this go. Politico reported:
After appearing in a closed-door deposition with the House Judiciary Committee earlier this week, Jack Smith, the former special counsel who led the criminal cases against President Donald Trump, still wants the chance to defend his work in a public hearing — and defend himself against continued Republican attacks.
Attorneys for Smith are pressing for their client to be allowed to testify in an open forum in a new letter to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, obtained first by POLITICO.
The former special counsel appeared before the Jordan-led committee for more than eight hours last week, and while the public hasn’t seen or heard a word of what transpired behind closed doors (Smith’s efforts notwithstanding), the Q&A was recorded and transcribed.
The prosecutor’s lawyers are now requesting that the public be allowed to see that hearing, while simultaneously asking for a separate hearing on the same subject that Americans can watch live.
In theory, this sounds like what Jordan and other Republicans are supposed to want. GOP lawmakers have been eager, if not desperate, to generate interest in their investigation, their expansive conspiracy theories about the criminal investigations into Trump, and their interest in Smith in particular, whom the party has gone out of its way to smear in ugly terms.
An opportunity to show Republicans pressing the former special counsel for answers seems like the sort of thing Jordan and the GOP should jump on.
But they’re not. Indeed, Republicans have thus far refused to comment on why they’re suddenly so determined to keep this information under wraps.
Except that we know the answer, just as we also know why Jordan is so reluctant to say it out loud. The New York Times reported earlier this month that House Republicans were “reluctant to give [Smith] a prime public platform out of concern that he could embarrass Trump by making a compelling case for the indictments over the president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his retention of classified documents.” That is, the point of the GOP hearing was to try to trip up the former special counsel, not to offer him a legitimate opportunity to present evidence and tell inconvenient truths that the party prefers to keep from the public. After the committee heard directly from Smith and saw him testify as to the seriousness of the evidence he’d compiled against the president, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, joked that Jordan “made an excellent decision in not allowing Jack Smith to testify publicly, because had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities of Jan. 6.” The former special counsel and his attorneys can keep asking, but at this point, it’s likely that Jordan and his Republican colleagues will never allow Americans to see Smith to testify. I wouldn’t be too surprised if some in the party are regretting having asked the prosecutor to answer their questions in the first place. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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