Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith claimed Wednesday that his investigative team has “developed evidence beyond a reasonable doubt” against U.S. President Donald Trump that he criminally conspired to sway the 2020 election, according to portions of his opening statement obtained by The Associated Press.
Smith reportedly told lawmakers in a closed-door interview Wednesday that investigators had amassed “powerful evidence” that Trump broke the law by hoarding classified documents from the president’s first term at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., and by obstructing government efforts to obtain the records.
“I made decisions as part of the investigation without regard to President Trump’s political affiliation, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election,” Smith said. “We took action based on what the facts and the law required — exactly what I learned early in my career as a prosecutor.”
He said that if asked if he would “impeach a former president on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether the president was a Republican or a Democrat.”
Daylong testimony before the House Judiciary Committee gave lawmakers of both parties their first chance, albeit in private, to question Smith for hours about the Trump investigation that resulted in criminal charges between the Republican president’s first and second terms. Smith was subpoenaed by the Republican Testimony and Documents Committee as part of the GOP investigation into the Trump investigation during the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden.
The former special counsel cooperated with the congressional request, although his lawyers noted that he had volunteered to answer questions publicly before the committee more than a month before the subpoena was issued — an overture that Republicans said was rejected. Trump told reporters he supports the idea of a public hearing.
“Jack testifying before this committee shows tremendous courage in light of the remarkable and unprecedented retaliatory campaign against him by this administration and this White House,” Smith’s attorney, Lanny Breuer, told reporters. “Let’s be clear: Jack Smith, a career prosecutor, conducted this investigation based on the facts and the law and nothing more.
Smith was appointed in 2022 to oversee the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 loss to Biden and Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Smith’s team filed charges in both investigations, but dropped those cases after Trump was elected to the White House last year, citing Justice Department legal opinions that say a sitting president cannot be impeached.
Several previous Justice Department special counsels, including Robert Mueller, have testified publicly, but Smith has only been subpoenaed for a private interview. Several Democrats who emerged from Smith’s interview said they understood why Republicans did not want an open hearing based on the damaging testimony Smith offered about Trump.
The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, said the Republican majority “made a great decision” in not allowing Smith to testify publicly, “because if he did, it would be absolutely devastating to the president and all of the president’s men involved in the insurgent activities” of the January 6, 2021 riots at the Capitol.
“Jack Smith just spent several hours training the judicial committee on the professional responsibility of the prosecutor and the ethical obligations of the prosecutor,” Raskin said.
Democrats are demanding that Smith’s testimony be released along with his full investigative report. The volume on the investigation of classified documents has not yet been published.
“The American people should hear for themselves,” said Rep. Dan Goldman, DN.Y.
The committee’s chairman, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, told reporters: “I think we learned some interesting things.” He declined to discuss what was said in the room, but reiterated his stance on the investigation.
“It’s political,” he said.
Smith’s interview took place against the backdrop of a broader retaliatory campaign by the Trump administration against former officials involved in the investigation of Trump and his allies. The Office of Special Counsel, an independent political watchdog, said in August it was investigating Smith, and the White House this year issued a presidential memo aimed at suspending security clearances for lawyers at the law firm that provided legal services to Smith.
The deposition also comes as congressional Republicans, aided by current FBI leadership, seek to discredit the Trump investigation by releasing emails and other documents that sometimes lack full context.
In recent weeks, they have seized on revelations that Smith’s team, as part of its investigation, analyzed the phone records of select GOP lawmakers from the days surrounding the Capitol uprising, when pro-Trump rioters stormed the building to try to stop confirmation of Trump’s election loss to Biden.
The phone records reviewed by prosecutors contained information about incoming and outgoing phone numbers and the length of the call, but not the content of the conversations. Smith told lawmakers Wednesday that the records were properly subpoenaed, “were relevant to the completion of a comprehensive investigation” and related to Trump’s calls urging lawmakers to delay certification of the election.
On Tuesday, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released a series of internal FBI emails that led to the search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022. In one memo, written weeks before the search, the agent wrote that the FBI’s Washington field office did not believe there was probable cause to search the property for classified records.
But Republicans who trumpeted the emails as evidence that Biden’s Justice Department was out to get Trump omitted the fact that agents who later searched the property reported finding boxes of classified, even top secret, documents. Additionally, the head of the Washington field office at the time testified to lawmakers that at the time of the search, the FBI believed there was probable cause to do so.
