Smith Defends Trump Probes at Hearing  01/23 06:07

   Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith defended his 
investigations of President Donald Trump at a congressional hearing Thursday in 
which he insisted that he had acted without regard to politics and had no 
second thoughts about the criminal charges he brought.

   WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith 
defended his investigations of President Donald Trump at a congressional 
hearing Thursday in which he insisted that he had acted without regard to 
politics and had no second thoughts about the criminal charges he brought.

   "No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he 
be held to account. So that is what I did," Smith said of Trump.

   Smith testified behind closed doors last month but returned to the House 
Judiciary Committee for a public hearing that provided the prosecutor with a 
forum to address Congress and the country more generally about the breadth of 
evidence he collected during investigations that shadowed Trump during the 2024 
presidential campaign and resulted in indictments. The hourslong hearing 
immediately split along partisan lines as Republican lawmakers sought to 
undermine the former Justice Department official while Democrats tried to 
elicit damaging testimony about Trump's conduct and accused their GOP 
counterparts of attempting to rewrite history.

   "It was always about politics," said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the 
committee's Republican chairman.

   "Maybe for them," retorted Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, referring to 
Republicans. "But, for us, it's all about the rule of law."

   The hearing was on the mind of Trump himself as he traveled back from the 
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with the president posting on his 
Truth Social account that "Deranged Jack Smith should be prosecuted for his 
actions" and asserting without any evidence that the prosecutor had committed 
perjury.

   Smith told lawmakers that he stood behind his decisions as special counsel 
to bring charges against Trump in separate cases that accused the Republican of 
conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election after he lost to Democrat 
Joe Biden and hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm 
Beach, Florida, after he left the White House.

   "Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President 
Trump engaged in criminal activity," Smith said. "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."

   Republicans and Smith spar over phone records

   Republicans from the outset sought to portray Smith as an overly aggressive, 
hard-charging prosecutor who had to be "reined in" by higher-ups and the courts 
as he investigated Trump. They seized on revelations that the Smith team had 
subpoenaed the phone records of a group of Republican lawmakers.

   The records revealed the incoming and outgoing phone numbers as well as the 
duration of the calls but not the content of the communications, but Rep. 
Brandon Gill, a Texas Republican, said the episode showed how Smith had "walked 
all over the Constitution."

   Smith has repeatedly justified the move as necessary to document any contact 
that Trump or surrogates may have had with lawmakers on Jan. 6, 2021 --the day 
Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol -- as he beseeched them to halt the 
certification of the election results.

   "My office didn't spy on anyone," Smith said, explaining that collecting 
phone records is a common prosecutorial tactic and was essential in this 
instance to help prosecutors understand the scope of the conspiracy.

   Smith describes a wide-ranging conspiracy on 2020

   Under questioning, Smith described what he said was a wide-ranging 
conspiracy to overturn the results of the election and recounted how the 
Republican refused to listen to advisers who told him that the contest had in 
fact not been stolen. After he was charged, Smith said, Trump tried to silence 
and intimidate potential witnesses against him.

   Smith said one reason he felt confident in the strength of the case that 
prosecutors had prepared to take to trial was the extent to which it relied on 
Republican supporters of Trump.

   "Some of the most powerful witnesses were witnesses who, in fact, were 
fellow Republicans who had voted for Donald Trump, who had campaigned for him 
and who wanted him to win the election," Smith said.

   Smith was appointed in 2022 by Biden's Justice Department to oversee 
investigations into Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing. Both investigations 
produced indictments against Trump, but the cases were abandoned by Smith and 
his team after Trump won back the White House because of longstanding Justice 
Department legal opinions that say sitting presidents cannot be indicted.

   The hearing unfolded against the backdrop of an ongoing Trump administration 
retribution campaign targeting the investigators who scrutinized the Republican 
president and amid mounting alarm that the Justice Department's institutional 
independence is eroding under the sway of the president.

   In a nod to those concerns, Smith said, "My belief is that if we do not hold 
the most powerful people in our society to the same standards -- the rule of 
law -- it can be catastrophic because, if they don't have to follow the law, 
it's very easy for people to understand why they don't have to follow the law."

   Rep. Becca Balint, a Vermont Democrat, also asked Smith at one point if he 
was concerned the Trump administration would try to prosecute him.

   Smith responded: "I believe they will do everything in their power to do 
that because they've been ordered to by the president."

   GOP says Smith wanted to wreck Trump's White House bid

   Republicans, for their part, repeatedly denounced Smith, with Rep. Kevin 
Kiley of California accusing him of seeking "maximum litigation advantage at 
every turn" and "circumventing constitutional limitations to the point that you 
had to be reined in again and again throughout the process."

   Another Republican lawmaker, Rep. Ben Cline of Virginia, challenged Smith on 
his team's requested court order to restrict Trump from making incendiary 
comments about prosecutors, potential witnesses and other people involved in 
the case. Smith said the order was necessary because of Trump's efforts to 
intimidate witnesses, but Cline asserted that it was meant to silence Trump in 
the heat of the presidential campaign.

   And Jordan, the committee chairman, advanced a frequent Trump talking point 
that the investigation was driven by a desire to derail Trump's candidacy.

   "We should never forget what took place, what they did to the guy we, the 
people, elected twice," Jordan said.

   Smith vigorously rejected those suggestions and said the evidence placed 
Trump's actions squarely at the heart of a criminal conspiracy to undo the 2020 
election.

   "Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 
6, it was foreseeable to him and that he sought to exploit the violence," he 
said.