The House Judiciary Committee may be inviting former special counsel Jack Smith to testify Thursday in an attempt to undercut the legitimacy of Smith and his investigation, or in the attempt to catch him in a lie. Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has framed the hearing as necessary oversight of the longtime prosecutor’s decision to charge President Donald Trump with a multitude of federal crimes in 2023. But whatever House Republicans’ intentions, by inviting Smith’s public testimony, they’re giving him the public platform to make the case that juries never got to hear.
The last time there was this much buzz for a special prosecutor’s testimony was July 2019. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller sat for two days of hearings before the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees to present the results of his investigation into the Trump campaign’s Russia ties and, crucially, the subsequent attempts to obstruct his work. There were certainly damning parts in Mueller’s two-volume report, including 10 episodes of potential obstruction of justice from Trump in trying to block or otherwise impede the Russia investigation. But what followed was a two-day snoozefest for anyone hoping for explosive testimony from Mueller.
As Smith said in his closed-door deposition, his office “believed that we had proof beyond a reasonable doubt for all the charges and that we would have gotten convictions at trial.”
Mueller had ultimately decided that he had no jurisdiction to indict a sitting president and had told reporters that if asked to testify before Congress, “any testimony from this office would not go beyond our report. It contains our findings and analysis, and the reasons for the decisions we made.” Without the ability to carry forward a prosecution, as he told frustrated House Democrats, he couldn’t in good conscience present a case against Trump. Nor would Mueller “totally exonerate” Trump as the president claimed the report had done.
Smith, by contrast, successfully obtained multiple indictments against Trump. As he said in his closed-door deposition before the Judiciary Committee last month, his office “believed that we had proof beyond a reasonable doubt for all the charges and that we would have gotten convictions at trial.” And based on the transcript and video from that deposition, the committee’s Democrats will be more than happy to help Smith lay out the case that Trump successfully managed to delay long enough to get re-elected.
On some levels, the story Smith will tell Thursday is a familiar one. The first volume of his full report, which focused on Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, was released days before Trump’s second term began a year ago. That volume covered much of the same ground as the House Jan. 6 Committee’s investigation and neatly summarized the information that had been strewn throughout Smith’s indictment of Trump and subsequent court filings. (U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon is currently blocking the second volume, which deals with Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after leaving office, from being publicly released and Smith has said he will abide by that court order.)
Unlike Mueller, Smith isn’t making himself an easy target for Jordan and his fellow Republican
But unlike Mueller, whose stoniness worked against him when Republicans attacked his findings, Smith isn’t making himself an easy target for Jordan and his fellow Republicans. Over the course of the more than eight hours Smith spent testifying, the committee’s Republicans tried to catch Smith slipping on the minutiae of his decision to prosecute Trump, the origins of his appointment as special counsel and the work of his prosecutors. The results were laughable.
To wit: Republican staffers spent the first hour focused on the Justice Department’s decision to subpoena carrier services for “toll records” from members of Congress as part of the initial Jan. 6 investigation. The metadata from those records shows the time, duration and recipient of calls and texts from a phone, but not their content. Smith said many of those decisions were made before he was appointed as special counsel; still, he was willing to explain why those logs were necessary for establishing a timeline of events: Well, I can tell you that, for example, there were — there was contact on, for example, January 6. But, again, another example for you is [former White House Chief of Staff] Mark Meadows, when he interviewed, when we interviewed him, he referenced the fact that that afternoon Chairman Jordan had been in contact with the White House. And, like [then-GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s] contact with the White House, it was relevant because, again, Meadows stated this, that these were supporters. These were credible people that the President relied on. And what I recall was Meadows stating that “I’ve never seen Jim Jordan scared of anything,” and the fact that we were in this different situation now where people were scared really made it clear that what was going on at the Capitol could not be mistaken for anything other than what it was. And it goes back to that sort of information from someone who is a credible source to the President, proving that that actually happened and that there’s actually a record of that call and exactly when it happened and what actions happened after that or didn’t happen after that, extremely probative to our case. After Smith directly called out Jordan like that, it’s hard to understand why the chairman would agree to another round of questioning with him. It may be that Jordan’s once again performing for an audience of one. That is, showing Trump that his demands for Smith’s punishment are being heeded. There could also be a hope that Smith stumbles just enough between his sworn deposition and his public follow-up to accuse him of lying to Congress. But if the GOP is banking on Smith following Mueller’s lead and simply pointing back to his report, they’re setting themselves up for embarrassment. If anything, the MAGA loyalists have given Smith a chance to highlight the yawning gulf between the story they tell about the 2020 election and the truth.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW Daily. 
