Former special counsel Jack Smith testified privately for hours to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, aiming to dispel Republican efforts to frame his federal prosecutions of President Donald Trump as unjust and political.
Smith said in his opening statements that prosecutors collected enough evidence against Trump during the Biden administration to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he unlawfully attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and that he unlawfully retained classified materials after he left office.
“The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions, as alleged in the indictments returned by grand juries in two different districts,” said Smith, according to portions of the opening statement obtained by The Washington Post.
Smith was seen entering a private room on Capitol Hill at about 10 a.m., where he was set to testify before lawmakers. The proceedings stretched for over 8 hours.
The testimony was the result of weeks of back-and-forth between Smith and Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, who have demanded that the former special counsel testify in private.
Smith, who is a private citizen and does not work for the Justice Department, repeatedly has said that he would sit for an interview with lawmakers in a public setting, but that he did not want to do it behind closed doors. His supporters have expressed concern that a private interview would be subject to selective leaks by committee members.
Smith oversaw two federal investigations into Trump during the Biden administration. One examined Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified materials after he left office and his efforts to thwart investigators’ attempts to retrieve them. The other probed his alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Neither of the cases went to trial. A federal judge in Florida dismissed the classified documents case against Trump, ruling that then-Attorney General Merrick Garland unlawfully appointed Smith as special counsel. The Justice Department was appealing that decision but dropped it after Trump was elected president.
Smith also dropped the election interference case right before Trump became president, citing federal regulations that prohibit prosecutions against sitting presidents.
Trump, who has pushed for the Justice Department to prosecute his political foes, has called on law enforcement to investigate Smith. To avoid any potential prosecution based on his testimony, Smith had to answer each question with extreme care — no matter what lawmakers asked him. Strict secrecy laws meant that Smith could not answer any questions about grand jury interviews or materials, according to people familiar with his testimony.
There is an ongoing court battle over the release of his final report detailing findings in the classified document probe.
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon — who oversaw the legal proceedings for the classified document case in Florida — has barred the release of that report, legally preventing Smith from speaking about it during his testimony. Advocacy groups have pushed in court for the report’s release — and Trump has asked the court permission to personally make a motion calling for it to be kept under seal.
Smith could risk prosecution if he opts not to answer any questions. Lawmakers referred one of Smith’s deputies on the special counsel team, Thomas Windom, to the Justice Department to be prosecuted for obstruction after he appeared before lawmakers and allegedly did not answer their questions.
The Justice Department has not commented on whether it plans to charge Windom.
Smith and his special counsel team have said they had no choice but to drop the cases against Trump and have insisted that the cases were strong enough to get convictions at trial.
The Trump administration has fired multiple prosecutors and agents who worked on the cases and has portrayed Smith and his team as corrupt and politicized. The committee has also called some of Smith’s deputies on the special counsel team for testimony.
“In today testifying before this committee, Jack is showing tremendous courage in light of the remarkable and unprecedented retribution campaign against him by this administration and this White House,” Smith’s attorney, Lanny Breuer, said Wednesday morning before entering the briefing room with Smith. “Let’s be clear. Jack Smith, a career prosecutor, conducted this investigation based on the facts and based on the law and nothing more.”
In recent months, Republican lawmakers have released investigatory material around Smith’s probes to try to show that the special counsel team acted inappropriately and with malintent against Trump. The releases have often lacked the necessary legal context, with Smith’s defenders saying the releases were intended to mislead the public about the probe.
Last month, Senate Republicans held a news conference to accuse Smith of improperly obtaining the phone records of nine Republican lawmakers as part of an election interference probe.
The senators did not explain that Smith obtained the information through subpoenas and that the records did not include the contents of their phone calls or messages. Instead, the records included a log of who the senators contacted and for how long they were on the phone in the days around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Smith defended obtaining those records to lawmakers Wednesday, saying that he was following the evidence in the case.
“Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election,” Smith said in his opening statements, according to the excerpts obtained by The Post. “I didn’t choose those Members; President Trump did.”
The Justice Department recently gave Republican lawmakers internal communications that show that some FBI agents in 2022 were hesitant about conducting a search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to retrieve the sensitive materials he took from the White House.
The Trump administration officials on social media have amplified reports of these communications in recent days, seemingly as a way to show that they have uncovered evidence supporting their belief that the search was unjustified.
But the dispute around the search — which was authorized by a judge — had long been public. It has also been reported that once agents saw video footage of Trump employees moving around boxes of the government documents, they approved of the search.
Jeremy Roebuck contributed to this report.
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