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Jack Smith Set To Face Republicans In Public Hearing

WASHINGTON ― Jack Smith has no regrets about pushing criminal charges against President Donald Trump, the former special counsel will tell lawmakers on Thursday.

“President Trump was charged because the evidence established that he willfully broke the very laws that he took an oath to uphold,” Smith will say in his opening statement before the House Judiciary Committee, according to a copy of the remarks obtained by HuffPost.

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Smith secured two grand jury indictments against Trump for his schemes to overturn the 2020 presidential election result and his hoarding of classified documents after the end of his first term as president.

Since the Justice Department has a policy against prosecuting a sitting president, the cases went away after Trump returned to the White House, and Smith never had a chance to take Trump to trial. Thursday’s hearing will be Smith’s first chance to defend his work in public ― and to square off against some of the Republicans who’ve spent years vilifying him.

“It’ll just show that Jack Smith was sort of the culmination of this 10-year, this decade-long attack on the president,” House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told reporters on Wednesday. “It just didn’t fly.”

In December, Jordan subpoenaed Smith for a private deposition, despite Smith’s repeated demands for a public hearing. After the deposition, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Jordan had made an “excellent decision” to keep the testimony private because Smith’s accounting of his work was “absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities of January the 6th.”

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Smith responded forcefully to Republican questions, according to a transcript of the deposition released on New Year’s Eve. At one point in the hours-long interview, Jordan asked Smith if the First Amendment protected Trump’s false public statements about the 2020 election having been rigged or stolen.

“Absolutely not. If they are made to target a lawful government function and they are made with knowing falsity, no, they are not,” Smith said.

Jordan pressed, asking why Trump couldn’t speak out like past presidential candidates who disputed election results.

“As we said in the indictment, he was free to say that he thought he won the election. He was even free to say falsely that he won the election. But what he was not free to do was violate federal law and use knowing ― knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function,” Smith said, referring to Trump’s efforts to disrupt the certification of the election result on Jan. 6, 2021.

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Smith also defended his decision to get court orders to secretly grab “toll records” from members of Congress who had phone calls with Trump while the Capitol was under siege ― another topic Republicans will likely pursue on Thursday. In his deposition, Smith said Trump was getting calls “from people he trusts, calls from people he relies on ― and still refuses to come to the aid of the people at the Capitol. That’s very important evidence for criminal intent in our case.”