Former special counsel Jack Smith appeared unrattled nearly four hours into his testimony Thursday before the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee detailing the two criminal investigations he led of President Donald Trump.
Smith faced sharp questions from Republicans as they tried to paint him as a partisan prosecutor, grilling him over subpoenas that were issued to collect phone logs from GOP senators as part of his investigation into Trump’s attempts to challenge the results of the 2020 election. They also pointed to the gag orders Smith’s team requested against Trump, which Smith said was done to protect witnesses.
Smith fired back, refuting Republican accusations that he had brought the cases against Trump for political retribution. “I have been an apolitical public servant for 30 years,” Smith said. “I’ve prosecuted cases against Democrats and Republicans all the same.”
During the hearing, Trump took to his social media platform to call on Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Smith.
“Jack Smith is a deranged animal, who shouldn’t be allowed to practice Law. If he were a Republican, his license would be taken away from him, and far worse!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Hopefully the Attorney General is looking at what he’s done, including some of the crooked and corrupt witnesses that he was attempting to use in his case against me.”
Democrats were set on highlighting the findings and evidence from Smith’s investigations into Trump.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., asked him how he would “describe the toll on our democracy” if the Justice Department had neglected to hold Trump accountable for attempting to “steal an election.” Smith said it threatened the “structure of our democracy.”
“I believe that if we don’t call people to account when they commit crimes in this context, it can endanger our election process,” Smith said. “It can endanger election workers and, ultimately, our democracy. The attack on this Capitol on Jan. 6 was, and the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., said this, it was an attack on the structure of our democracy.”
The hearing is part of a probe led by congressional Republicans into the criminal cases Smith brought against Trump after he left office in 2021. In one, Smith alleged that Trump interfered in the 2020 presidential election by spreading false claims of widespread voter fraud and organizing fake slates of electors to subvert the results. In the other, Smith’s team contended that Trump improperly stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after his first term in office.
Both of the criminal cases led to federal indictments but were ultimately dismissed after Trump won his second term, due to a long-standing Department of Justice policy that prevents sitting presidents from facing criminal prosecution.
Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, raised the phone record subpoenas within the first 15 seconds of his opening statement. He accused Smith of obtaining the phone records of top congressional Republicans, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, for political gain.
The FBI sought to obtain phone logs from select Republicans in the days immediately before and after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The phone records have become central to the GOP investigation of Smith, as have reports that Smith sought to obtain “toll records,” which are records of cellular communication, from Senate Republicans.
The metadata from those logs comes from cellular carrier services. It details the time, duration and recipient of calls and texts from a phone, but does not include audio recordings or other conversation content. Smith has previously said many of those toll record subpoena decisions were made before he was appointed as special counsel. Smith explained in December why those logs were necessary for establishing a timeline of the events that transpired on Jan. 6, 2021.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the ranking member of the committee, used his opening remarks to praise the Capitol police officers and other law enforcement officers who were on duty on Jan. 6, several of whom were in the audience.
Raskin thanked them for staying at their posts “when Trump incited mass violence on Jan. 6, while more than 140 officers were being brutally assaulted by Trump’s mob, while rioters beat them with flagpoles and sprayed them with chemical agents and crushed them in doorways and while they chanted, ‘Hang Mike Pence,’ and chased the vice president out of the Capitol.”
The president and his allies have long accused Smith of “weaponizing” the Justice Department for political retribution against Trump by bringing the 2020 election interference case. But in a 250-page transcript released in December after Smith sat for an eight-hour closed-door deposition before the committee, the former special counsel rejected the accusations. Jordan grilled Smith over Cassidy Hutchinson, a former senior adviser to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, who offered key testimony to the House select committee tasked with investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Hutchinson provided detailed accounts of what Trump and Meadows knew in the days leading up to the attack and their response to the violence that took place at the Capitol. Hutchinson has since become a pariah to congressional conservatives for the explosive Jan. 6 testimony she provided. She received myriad death threats from supporters of Trump and his allies over her testimony, which she said pushed her into hiding out of fear for her safety in her 2023 memoir, “Enough.” Hutchinson was 24 years old when she served in the first Trump administration. Smith had pushed for the December deposition to be public, but the committee’s Republican leadership refused. The day after Smith completed the deposition, his lawyers wrote a letter to Jordan, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, asking him to release the full video of the deposition quickly, writing, “Doing so will ensure that the American people can hear the facts directly from Mr. Smith, rather than through second-hand accounts.” The transcript of the deposition was later released on New Year’s Eve. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee based in Florida, dismissed the classified documents case after Trump returned to the presidency. Last year, Cannon ordered that Smith’s final report on that case remain under seal until Feb. 24. That means Smith can’t speak publicly about findings of the classified documents investigation that are not already in the public record. Trump on Tuesday filed a motion before Cannon seeking an expedited order that would indefinitely prohibit the release of Volume 2 of Smith’s final report. If granted, troves of findings from the classified documents investigation will remain sealed. Smith will not be able to speak about those details at the hearing Thursday. Smith was appointed to his former role in 2022 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and resigned in January 2025, less than two weeks before Trump resumed office and just after Smith had completed a report that found that the department had enough evidence to convict Trump of election interference by working to overthrow his 2020 election loss to former President Joe Biden. This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Sydney Carruth is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. Recommended
