Former Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith has defended the two criminal prosecutions he led against President Donald Trump, in an appearance before a committee in the United States House of Representatives.
Testifying in a closed-door meeting on Wednesday, Smith took questions from the House Judiciary Committee about the two criminal indictments he ultimately spearheaded.
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The first, filed in June 2023, alleged that Trump mishandled classified information while out of office. The second, in August of the same year, accused the Republican leader of seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost.
“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,” Smith told the committee.
He also fended off accusations from the Republican-led committee that his investigations had been politically motivated.
“I made my decisions in the investigation without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs or candidacy in the 2024 election,” Smith said.
“We took actions based on what the facts and the law required — the very lesson I learned early in my career as a prosecutor.”
Smith added that the basis of his prosecutions “rests entirely with President Trump and his actions” and that he would make the same decision again today to bring charges, whether the defendant in question were a Republican or Democrat.
Smith’s appearance came as a result of a Republican-led subpoena, issued on December 3, for his testimony.
The subpoena set December 12 as the deadline for Smith to turn over documents related to the case, and Wednesday as the date for his congressional appearance.
Smith’s remarks, however, took place behind closed doors, despite his request to hold the hearing in public.
Still, portions of his opening statement were provided to news agencies, including The Associated Press.
Republicans have maintained that the cases against Trump were partisan in nature and were designed to derail his 2024 re-election bid.
“This was political. This was about going after the Republican Party, and most importantly, it was about going after our candidate for president, President Trump,” Representative Jim Jordan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told the TV programme Fox and Friends on Wednesday.
Formerly a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Smith was appointed as a special counsel to the Justice Department in 2022, under former President Joe Biden.
Special counsels are selected from outside the Justice Department to prevent conflicts of interest in cases that are politically sensitive, and they operate without daily oversight from the department.
Smith ultimately dropped the two federal cases against Trump after the Republican leader’s successful re-election in 2024, as it is against Justice Department policy to prosecute a sitting president. He later resigned in January, shortly before Trump took office.
But Trump has repeatedly called for Smith to be prosecuted for his role in the criminal cases against him.
In October, for instance, Trump posted a link to an article about Smith on his Truth Social platform, accompanied by the message: “These thugs should all be investigated and put in prison. A disgrace to humanity. Deranged Jack Smith is a criminal!!!”
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has aggressively pushed for the prosecution of critics and political rivals and has continued to push the false claim that he was the true winner of the 2020 election instead of Biden.
Democrats, meanwhile, have pushed the Trump administration to make Smith’s full report into the two federal cases public.
After Wednesday’s hearing, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jamie Raskin, told reporters that there was a reason Republicans wanted Smith to testify in private.
Had he testified in public, Raskin said, “It would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities” on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol.
