Jack Smith Testifies About Trump Investigations

Former special counsel Jack Smith survived a marathon grilling from lawmakers on Wednesday, giving closed-door testimony to a House committee investigating his prosecutions of President Trump.

The only prosecutor to ever indict a US president sat for an hourslong deposition on Capitol Hill, with neither he nor his attorney, Lanny Breuer, answering reporters’ questions on the proceedings.

Smith, who resigned days before Trump returned to the White House, looked forlorn as he passed a row of TV cameras and entered the deposition room just before 10 a.m. — where he delivered a defiant opening statement defending his actions.

“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether the president was a Republican or Democrat,” Smith insisted in a statement.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power.”

He went on to double down on allegations against Trump and his former co-defendants, characterizing their efforts on Jan. 6, 2020 as illegal.

“President Trump and his associates tried to call members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election,” Smith told the committee. “I didn’t choose those members; President Trump did.”

Smith, 56, brought two separate cases against Trump for allegedly hoarding classified documents and seeking to overturn the 2020 election result.

“The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions, as alleged in the indictments returned by grand juries in two different districts,” the former prosecutor said.

If convicted, Trump could have spent the remainder of his life in prison, and Republicans accuse Smith of using “lawfare” to try and prevent Trump’s successful comeback in last year’s election.

Trump, 79, has attacked Smith as a “rabid wolf” and a “thug” and Republicans are expected to go hard against him, while Democrats are likely to be more sympathetic and frame his prosecutions as justified.

In a rare point of agreement, both Smith and Trump requested that the deposition be converted into a public hearing carried live on television.

The private setting means that interested parties are likely to leak certain exchanges before their full context becomes clear.

Democrats on the committee expressed support for the ex-special counsel as his testimony continued into the afternoon, with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) telling reporters that Smith is “a class act in every way.”

Asked why Republicans chose to hold the deposition behind closed doors, Raskin alleged that it was done to “avoid public view.”

After it ended, the House Judiciary Committee ranking member snarked that the GOP “made an excellent decision in not allowing Jack Smith to testify publicly, because had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities of Jan. 6.”

But Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) shared some of what Smith said in the deposition, claiming he “made very clear that volume two of the special counsel’s report is only not being released because the judge in Florida refuses to authorize its release.”

“That is absolutely unacceptable for her to sit on such a basic request for almost a year now,” he opined.

Smith also told lawmakers that the cases of Trump’s two codefendants in the Florida case — his valet, Walt Nauta, and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira — “had no reason to be dismissed,” Goldman said.

“Even though Donald Trump’s justice department dismissed those as soon as he came into office, there was no basis [for this] on the evidence,” the lawmaker said.

Smith, a former International Criminal Court prosecutor, was appointed as special counsel in charge of ongoing Biden Justice Department investigations into Trump in November 2022.

Republicans said Smith was picked by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to ensure indictments, citing his allegedly overzealous record in going after politicians like former Virginia Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, against whom Smith won a 2014 conviction in a corruption case that was later overturned by the Supreme Court.

The special counsel won an initial indictment against Trump in June 2023 in the documents case, followed by a second that August on the election-related counts — both after Trump declared his candidacy for a second non-consecutive term.

Smith maintained in an exit report on his prosecutions that “but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”

The classified documents case had been thrown out in July 2024, when South Florida US District Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that Smith had been improperly appointed as special counsel without congressional approval.

Republicans in both chambers of Congress have been demanding Smith’s testimony for months, but he only appeared in response to a subpoena from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

The former special counsel indicated that he was open to appearing for a public hearing before the subpoena was issued.

Closed-door depositions afford lawmakers more time for follow-up questions, with members of each party being given more than just the five minutes typical of the public format — without the prospect of grandstanding for the cameras.

The ex-special counsel will almost certainly be grilled in the closed-door deposition about his decision to secretly subpoena Republican lawmakers’ phone logs in connection with the latter case.

The FBI’s Arctic Frost probe quietly seized phone metadata from at least 10 GOP members of Congress and fired off subpoenas to hundreds more Republican individuals and entities.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who first released DOJ records revealing the extent of the investigation into sitting lawmakers, described it as a “fishing expedition” that targeted the “entire Republican political apparatus.”