Ex-Trump prosecutor Smith forcefully defends investigations as Republicans assail his team’s tactics

WASHINGTON | Former special counsel Jack Smith forcefully defended his prosecutions of President Donald Trump and his investigative tactics, pushing back against repeated Republican efforts to paint him and his team as partisan political operators during a Senate hearing Tuesday that divided along familiar party lines.

The hearing came as Republicans have pushed for Smith to himself be prosecuted and offered a forum for them to assail him for what they contend were politicized prosecutions that unfolded at the height of the 2024 presidential race. Democrats rallied to Smith’s defense, eliciting testimony about the legal and factual basis for the criminal cases against the-then candidate and decrying the Trump administration’s firing of prosecutors involved in the investigations.

Smith, for his part, defended his work in an hours-long Senate Judiciary Committee hearing — the latest congressional effort to revisit federal cases that accused Trump of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 race and of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Both were abandoned after Trump’s 2024 election win.

“Anybody who has worked with me or knows me during the course of my career knows that I would not let politics play a role. And I would just add that if you knew the people I worked with, they would not either,” Smith said. He lamented what he called an unprecedented assault on the rule of law, and sweeping terminations of his team that he said had deprived the government of crucial expertise and made the country less safe.

“That has never happened in my career. I have never seen anything remotely like it in any Republican or Democratic administration,” he said.

The testimony did nothing to appease Smith’s Republican critics, who during the hearing described him as a “villain” and a “dirtbag,” worse than former President Richard Nixon. They even accused him of perjuring himself about his attendance at an out-of-town basketball game that appeared to be a misunderstanding over a team name.

The hearing focused heavily on subpoenas for lawmakers’ phone records

Smith was pressed anew by Republican senators about his team’s access to the phone records of GOP lawmakers as prosecutors investigated Trump’s efforts to reverse his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Prosecutors issued subpoenas for the phone records of numerous Republican members of Congress who were contacted by Trump or his aides on Jan. 6, 2021, the day supporters of the president rioted inside the U.S. Capitol. Smith has said that such subpoenas are common practice in investigations and were necessary in this instance to understand the “scope of the conspiracy” between Trump and his Republican allies.

The subpoenas, he said Tuesday, provided powerful “corroborating evidence” that Trump and his alleged co-conspirators sought to exploit the violence of the day by invoking it to try to further delay the congressional certification of Biden’s win.

“They were taking the fact that law enforcement officers had been assaulted at this institution and using that to seek to delay the proceedings further in violation of the law,” Smith said.

The data at issue are known as “toll records,” which reveal the date, length and time of phone calls between two parties but not the content of the communications.

Nonetheless, the revelation that Smith’s team secretly obtained the records has animated Republican lawmakers, who consider it proof of overreach by the Biden administration Justice Department and the hard-charging prosecutor it picked to be special counsel.

Several Republicans said the tactic was a breach of the “speech and debate” constitutional protection shielding lawmakers from prosecutorial scrutiny for their legislative acts. Smith denied that was the case and said he had received approval from the Justice Department’s elite Public Integrity Section.

In July, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, referred Smith to the Justice Department for potential prosecution on allegations he lied at a previous hearing about his collection of the records — something Smith’s attorneys have vigorously disputed.

“I stand by my testimony before the House of Representatives,” Smith said Tuesday. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the president or others.”

Smith faced bitingly personal criticism from Republicans

Smith was appointed by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to lead investigations into Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss and Trump’s retention of classified documents. Smith abandoned the prosecutions after Trump’s 2024 win, citing Justice Department opinions that sitting presidents cannot be federally indicted.

Smith has remained a top target of retribution for Trump and his administrations, and Republicans on the committee repeatedly confronted him in a hearing that frequently devolved into partisan sniping and name-calling. They sought to cast the prosecution as a political fishing expedition, accusing Smith of bending ordinary procedures in pursuit of Trump.

“The Smith election case ultimately wasn’t just about Trump,” said Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the committee. “It was about partisan agents and prosecutors mapping out the Republican apparatus.”

During one tense exchange, Republican Sen. John Kennedy grew exasperated as he pressed Smith on whether the Biden White House instructed the Justice Department to prosecute Trump. Smith said he had “no idea about that,” and that the decision to prosecute Trump was his own.

In an effort to show Smith was being evasive, Kennedy asked Smith whether he believed in the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny. Smith said no.

“You make me want to throw up in my mouth,” Kennedy told Smith as he concluded his line of questioning.

In another notable moment, Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt accused Smith of traveling to Atlanta and attending a game for the city’s NBA team — the Hawks — in February 2024 while Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was facing scrutiny for her romantic relationship with a special prosecutor in the Georgia 2020 election case.

But it appeared the Missouri senator got his teams confused. After appearing perplexed by the question and denying any travel to Georgia, Smith revealed that the contest he had actually attended was an Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball game in Maryland.

Schmitt appeared unbowed.

“You may think you’re a hero in this story, but let me tell you something: you’re the villain,” he said. “You will go down as a total dirtbag.”

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, accused Republicans of spreading “baseless conspiracy theories” about Smith’s investigations in an effort to “whitewash” the history of Trump’s election loss and the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“President Trump demonstrated a wanton disdain for the laws of the United States, the will of the people and our national security,” Durbin said. “The aspersions cast on Mr. Smith, nonstop, are petty, personal and political. They are nothing but a smoke screen to distract from the president’s own clear, unlawful conduct.”