A former federal prosecutor on Wednesday slammed the House GOP for releasing the transcript of former special counsel Jack Smith’s deposition earlier this month over the New Year’s holiday.
House Republicans interviewed Smith for several hours this month about his investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Following the interview, Smith called on Republicans to release the entire transcript. Republicans obliged on Wednesday by releasing the 255-page document and an eight-hour video of the interview.
Joyce Vance, author of the “Civil Discourse” newsletter on Substack and law professor at the University of Alabama, reacted to the release on “MS Now Reports.”
“Everything about this is odd,” Vance said. “The fact that the witness who wanted to testify publicly wasn’t permitted to. The fact that volume two of his report was not released in time for him to testify about it, and everything about this hearing appeared to be a setup with Jack Smith as the gotcha target for everything that was going on. Anyone who has not learned the lesson of Jim Comey’s prosecution, I think, needs to take that into account here, that it was, in many ways, an effort to set Smith up.”
Republicans repeatedly bashed Smith ahead of his deposition, claiming that his investigation was politically motivated. Smith pushed back forcefully against those assertions during his interview, according to the transcript, and told lawmakers he believes Trump can still be held accountable for his crimes.
The release occurred at a time when the Trump administration is seeking to distance itself from recently released files from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation that paint the president’s relationship with the disgraced financier and convicted sex criminal in an unscrupulous light.
“The public reason that Republicans gave for not doing this testimony in public was that they thought that Jack Smith would use it as an opportunity to grandstand,” Vance continued. “He did not. Now we have the release of both the video and the transcript. Of course, it’s happening on New Year’s Eve. The hope is that this document, which would have come out at some point, can now be lost in the shuffle of the evening’s festivities.”
The post Expert chides GOP release of Jack Smith transcript: ‘Everything about this seems off’ appeared first on Raw Story.
