Former special counsel Jack Smith is expected to return to Capitol Hill on Thursday to offer his first public testimony defending his efforts to prosecute Donald Trump.
The scheduled hearing, before the House Judiciary Committee, is unlikely to deliver many new insights into Smith’s now-shuttered investigations into how the then-former president handled classified documents or his alleged efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election. Smith fielded lawmakers’ questions about those probes during a closed-door deposition last month, and House Republicans have since released a full transcript of that eight-hour grilling.
But Thursday’s proceeding will offer Smith the opportunity to defend his work on his largest public stage to date amid Republican efforts to reframe it as a witch hunt tainted by partisan politics.
Smith is expected to tell lawmakers his team developed overwhelming evidence that “President Trump engaged in criminal activity” and that his investigations were lawful and consistent with Justice Department standards, according to a prepared version of his opening remarks obtained by The Washington Post. He made similar points during his deposition.
“I stand by my decisions as special counsel, including my decision to bring charges against President Trump,” Smith’s remarks say. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”
Of Trump, Smith is expected to say: “No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held account.”
The fact that Smith will deliver those statements at all in an open congressional hearing marks a small victory for the former special counsel, who has since left the Justice Department to open his own law firm with former deputies from his team.
When the Judiciary Committee subpoenaed him last year, Smith repeatedly offered to sit for an interview with lawmakers in a public setting. Those requests were rebuffed by committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) who insisted that questioning take place in private. Jordan scheduled Smith’s public testimony only after the 255-page transcript of the deposition was released.
In it, Smith offered a robust defense of the investigations that led to two indictments of Trump and expressed confidence that his team would have secured convictions had they had the opportunity to present their evidence to juries.
Neither case went to trial. A federal judge in Florida dismissed the classified documents case, ruling that Smith had been unlawfully appointed. The Justice Department abandoned its appeal of that decision after Trump’s 2024 election victory.
Smith dropped the election interference case before Trump’s return to the White House, citing Justice Department regulations that prohibit prosecutors from pursuing charges against sitting presidents.
Since his return to the White House, Trump has repeatedly called for Smith and others he has accused of weaponizing law enforcement against him to face prosecution.
“They gave me the worst of the worst, and here I am,” the president said during a news conference Tuesday organized to highlight his accomplishments during the first year of his term. Trump referred to Smith as “deranged” and lobbed other derogatory epithets before returning to his list of achievements.
Republicans, meanwhile, have used their control of Congress to undertake a granular reexamination of Smith’s work, eager to highlight anything that could paint his team’s efforts as driven by partisan animus.
During Smith’s December deposition, Jordan and other Republican committee members seized upon subpoenas Smith’s team obtained to secretly review the phone records of nine Republican senators as part of the investigations into Trump’s actions in the lead up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Lawmakers are likely to revisit the issue during Thursday’s hearing.
Smith has defended those requests, noting the subpoenas were essential to tracking phone calls made from the White House that day to Trump’s allies in the Senate as he sought to delay certification of the 2020 election’s results.
The records only provided a log of the times and lengths of those phone calls and text messages and did not disclose the contents of any senators’ communications. Ultimately, Smith blamed Trump for the need to obtain the records.
“I did not choose those members,” Smith told lawmakers in December. “President Trump did.”
Smith was equally frank in his attempts to beat back other criticism from Republican committee members during the deposition, even as he acknowledged his testimony could be used to attempt to prosecute him.
Jordan’s committee has already referred one of Smith’s deputies, Thomas Windom, to the Justice Department for potential prosecution on charges of obstructing Congress after he allegedly did not answer all their questions during a closed-door deposition last year.
“I am eyes wide open that this president will seek retribution against me if he can,” Smith said in his deposition in December.
Despite his desire to defend the work of his team, Smith laid out some ground rules at the start of his testimony last month — conditions he is likely to reiterate Thursday when he appears before the committee.
Strict secrecy rules barred him from answering any questions about grand jury interviews or materials, he said. Smith also said he was limited in what he could say about his team’s investigation of Trump’s handling of classified documents because of a court battle over the portion of his final report detailing the findings of that probe.
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon — who oversaw those proceedings — issued an order last year temporarily barring the report’s release.
In a court filing Tuesday, Trump’s personal defense lawyers urged her to permanently block the Justice Department from ever releasing the report publicly.
Perry Stein contributed to this report.
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