Former Special Counsel Jack Smith said President Trump clearly broke the law in the 2020 election conspiracy case and subsequent classified documents case, and defended his investigation in a politically charged appearance Thursday before a Republican-led congressional committee.
Delivering a scathing indictment of the once and current president, Smith coolly hammered Trump for violating laws he swore to uphold by seeking to overturn his loss to former President Biden in a corrupt effort that culminated with the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
“The investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” Smith said. “No one should be above the law in this country and the law required he be held to account.”
Smith took advantage of a rare platform to lay out key parts of the case he built against Trump, even as Republican lawmakers derided him as a liberal attack dog.
“It was always about politics,” Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in his opening statement.
But Smith, a veteran public corruption prosecutor, said he only followed the facts, and they led irrefutably to Trump’s culpability.
“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 Republican or a Democrat,” he said.
Trump, who was flying back from his appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, said Smith should face a criminal probe for “the crooked and corrupt witnesses that he was attempting to use in his case against me.”
“Jack Smith is a deranged animal, who shouldn’t be allowed to practice Law,” the president added in a post on his Truth Social site.
As he walked into the Capitol Hill hearing room, Smith smiled and nodded at four law enforcement officers who were attacked by the pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6: Michael Fanone, Daniel Hodges, Aquilino Gonell and Harry Dunn.
Brushing off Republican attacks, Smith laid out key portions of the evidence that Trump led an illegal conspiracy to cling to power after losing to Biden. There were no bombshell revelations, but his deadpan delivery rebutted GOP claims that he was an out-of-control liberal agent.
“He is the person most responsible for what happened on January 6,” Smith said of Trump. “He caused what happened. It was foreseeable to him, and then when it happened, he tried to exploit it in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
Republican lawmakers repeatedly attacked Smith for obtaining records of lawmakers’ calls, which he said was needed to investigate Trump’s wide-ranging scheme. He noted that the requests were approved by a federal judge.
Smith was appointed in late 2022 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to independently oversee investigations into Trump, who was planning what turned out to be a successful White House comeback.
Smith won indictments in both probes, but abandoned the cases after Trump won back the White House because of longstanding Justice Department legal opinions that say sitting presidents cannot be indicted.
Smith said little about the classified documents case, in which Trump was charged in 2023 with taking hundreds of sensitive government documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate after leaving office and defying the government’s efforts to get them back.
That was considered the strongest criminal case against Trump but was thwarted when federal Judge Aileen Cannon tossed the case on the legal technicality that Smith was improperly appointed.
