In his first public statement about his investigation into Donald Trump’s actions following the 2020 election, former special counsel Jack Smith said the evidence he had gathered was sufficient to prove the president broke the law to try to stay in power despite his loss to Joe Biden.
Mr. Smith withdrew the case more than a year ago, because of Mr. Trump’s 2024 election victory.
But at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, Mr. Smith said he stood by his decision to bring charges, noting that two grand juries concluded that “rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.” [Related Monitor story on the case, from 2024: Big development in Jan. 6 case against Trump. Why now?]
Why We Wrote This
Former special counsel Jack Smith’s efforts to prosecute Donald Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election results ended more than a year ago. But political partisanship around the issue remains strong – and was on display as Mr. Smith made his first public comments on the case during a House hearing.
“No one, no one should be above the law in this country, and the law required that he be held to account,” Mr. Smith said.
The hearing reflected the highly polarized political climate of Mr. Trump’s second term. There was at least one disruption by a pro-Trump audience member who was then removed from the room. Republicans decried Mr. Smith’s investigation as “weaponization of the judicial process.” Democrats alleged intimidation of witnesses and the rewriting of history by Mr. Trump.
The president appeared to be following the hearings closely, commenting on social media. “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,” Mr. Trump wrote. Last year, he directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate several political opponents, and charges were later filed against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
As a result of Mr. Smith’s investigation, a grand jury found probable cause to indict Mr. Trump with four charges related to his effort to overturn the 2020 results, which culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters on the day Congress was scheduled to certify those results. The charges were: “conspiring to obstruct the government function of selecting and certifying the President of the United States; obstructing and attempting to obstruct the official proceeding on January 6, 2021; conspiring to obstruct the official proceeding; and conspiring to violate the federal rights of citizens to vote and have their votes counted.”
After the November 2024 election, Mr. Smith dropped the charges on advice from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, citing a prohibition against prosecuting a sitting president.
Republicans on the committee used Thursday’s hearing as a chance to paint Mr. Smith as a pro-Biden partisan and to question the longtime prosecutor’s integrity and judgment.
“It was always about politics,” committee chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio said in his opening remarks. “The good news is the American people saw through it. … We elected President Trump twice.”
The committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, welcomed Mr. Smith in his opening remarks, saying, “Special Counsel Smith, you pursued the facts. You followed every applicable law, ethics rule and DOJ regulation, your decisions were reviewed by the Public Integrity section. You acted based solely on the facts, the opposite of Donald Trump.”
Other Republican committee members largely followed the lead of their chairman, asking Mr. Smith whether he had broken Justice Department protocols by subpoenaing the phone records of Mr. Trump and a number of congressional Republicans as part of the investigation, placing a gag order on President Trump about the ongoing investigation ahead of the 2024 presidential election, and other actions that Republicans say reveal Mr. Smith’s partisan bias and overreach of prosecutorial powers.
Republican Rep. Thomas Tiffany of Wisconsin listed a number of Mr. Smith’s previous cases that had been overturned or ended in mistrial, along with actions during the Trump investigation that were subsequently overturned by courts or led to a change in Justice Department policy. “I would just say this, Mr. Chairman, if Mr. Smith ever works for the Department of Justice again, I would recommend a remedial course on the First Amendment of the Constitution.”
Mr. Smith refuted allegations that his investigations were politically motivated. “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.”
Democrats defended Mr. Smith’s professionalism and adherence to procedure and called the Republican hearings “theater.”
“Republicans are trying to rewrite history, that’s what this is,” said Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado. Noting the four Capitol Police officers in the gallery who risked their lives defending members of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Neguse added: “It’s an outrage that [Republican lawmakers] now sit here and have the audacity to try to rewrite history in front of the very officers who sacrificed everything to protect them.”
On Capitol Hill, members of Congress who aren’t on the committee expressed their own views about the hearings and Mr. Smith.
Republican Rep. Russell Fry of South Carolina told the Monitor, “I think the whole goal is to show to the American people right now, the ways in which he manipulated process, bastardized Department of Justice standards, went beyond the scope of the law, and even violated the Constitution.”
Rep. Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, called Mr. Smith “a man of integrity” and said, “I hope he’s setting the record straight for Republicans on that committee who do everything they can to try to twist the truth.”
