The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday subpoenaed Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice prosecuted President Trump, for a closed-door interview this month, kicking off a confrontation Republican lawmakers see as both inevitable and politically perilous.
In a one-page letter sent more than a month after requesting Mr. Smith’s voluntary testimony, Jim Jordan, the chairman of the committee and Republican of Ohio, told the special counsel that “the committee believes that you possess information that is vital to its oversight of this matter.”
Mr. Smith had asked to testify in public. But House Republicans have been reluctant to give Mr. Smith a public platform out of concern that he could embarrass Mr. Trump, or themselves, by making a compelling case for investigating the president after he left office, including for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his retention of classified documents.
Peter Koski, Mr. Smith’s lawyer, said in a statement that his client was disappointed that the committee denied the American people the chance to hear from him directly. He added that Mr. Smith looked forward to answering lawmakers’ questions.
People close to Mr. Smith have said they are concerned the committee is less interested in fact-finding than luring him into making a mistake or misstatement sufficient to justify prosecution, which Mr. Trump has volubly demanded.
On Nov. 19, the committee referred Thomas Windom, a veteran prosecutor who led the investigation into Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, for criminal prosecution after he declined to answer some of their questions in a closed-door interview. It is not clear if the department has acted on that referral.
Mr. Smith, who spent more than two years aggressively collecting evidence to show that Mr. Trump put national security secrets at risk and tried to overturn the 2020 election, appears eager to publicly challenge a foundational pillar of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters: that the president did nothing to deserve prosecution.
Mr. Smith has told people in his orbit that he welcomes the opportunity to present the public case against Mr. Trump denied to him by the Supreme Court decision asserting broad presidential immunity from prosecution as well as adverse rulings from a Trump-appointed judge in Florida.
“Deranged Jack Smith is a criminal!!!” Mr. Trump said on social media in October after House Republicans released documents showing that the special counsel’s office examined communications between Mr. Trump and 160 Republicans as part of the inquiry into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
He has placed Mr. Smith at the top of his prosecutorial hit list, along with the attorney general under the Biden administration, Merrick B. Garland, and his top deputy, Lisa Monaco.
The president, in the same post in late October, demanded they all be “investigated and put in prison.”.
While Mr. Trump has expressed an eagerness to exact revenge, he is also wary of airing the evidence uncovered by Mr. Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor and longtime Justice Department official.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration re-upped its argument to block the release of evidence Mr. Smith collected during his investigation of Mr. Trump’s hoarding of classified materials at his resort in Florida.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
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