Jack Smith never got his day in court.
But he is finally getting his day in the court of public opinion.
Mr. Smith, the special prosecutor who twice indicted Donald J. Trump, is set to appear at a public hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday in a long-awaited confrontation that pits Mr. Trump’s defenders against the man who tried, and failed, to hold him to account.
The hearing poses significant risks to Mr. Smith, who has said he believes Mr. Trump and his appointees will seize on the smallest misstep to investigate, prosecute and humiliate him. But it also provides him with what is likely to be his best opportunity to challenge Mr. Trump’s justification for deploying the Justice Department to pursue his enemies: that he was persecuted for his politics, not for his misdeeds.
“No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account,” Mr. Smith is expected to say, according to a copy of his opening remarks. “So that is what I did.”
Mr. Smith’s three-page statement represents the summation he was never allowed to deliver in a courtroom, and concludes that Mr. Trump “engaged in criminal activity” that undermined democracy and the rule of law.
In his remarks, Mr. Smith is expected to accuse Mr. Trump of directing “an angry mob” to attack the Capitol, then exploiting the violence to delay congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory in 2020.
“Over 140 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted that day, a fact we should never forget,” Mr. Smith is expected to say.
The path that led to Mr. Smith’s testimony mirrored a tortuous legal and political odyssey that began in 2023, when he filed the first-ever federal criminal charges against a former president. It ended the next year when Mr. Trump won the presidency, intent on visiting vengeance on those who had prosecuted him.
For all their public denunciations of Mr. Smith, House Republicans had been privately reluctant to give him a public forum to make his case against Mr. Trump, after courts threw out charges against him in Florida and the District of Columbia.
Thursday’s testimony follows months of back and forth. Lawmakers debated how to proceed, and Mr. Smith demanded that he be given the right to defend his team. Lawmakers and Mr. Smith’s lawyers also wrestled over what the former special prosecutor was allowed to talk about (the election interference indictment in Washington) and what he was not allowed to discuss (many details about the document-retention case sealed by a Trump-appointed judge in Florida).
The committee’s chairman, Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, scheduled the public hearing following closed-door testimony by Mr. Smith on Dec. 17, an appearance that struck even his Republican critics as sure-footed and free of the type of misstep that might have led to a criminal prosecution on the grounds that he deceived or stonewalled Congress.
Republicans, led by Mr. Jordan and Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, have suggested that Mr. Smith was motivated by partisan politics, and have placed him at the center of what they have said was a conspiracy to weaponize the Justice Department against Mr. Trump and his allies.
The F.B.I., now run by a Trump ally, Kash Patel, has scoured its vast holdings to root out negative information about those who once investigated Mr. Trump and his supporters, an undertaking critics have called an opposition research operation.
On the eve of Mr. Smith’s appearance, the bureau continued to selectively release portions of Mr. Smith’s files to impugn him and the work of his team.
This time, the disclosure was made to the conservative journalist John Solomon. On Wednesday morning, he cited F.B.I. documents in reporting that prosecutors working for Mr. Smith had paid thousands of dollars to online sleuths to help them look for video evidence tying Trump supporters who attended the president’s rally near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, to the subsequent riot at the Capitol.
The work of the sleuths, often known as sedition hunters, was widely used to bring criminal cases against hundreds of the rioters. But Mr. Patel told Mr. Solomon that Mr. Smith’s payments for their help amounted to “a stunning abuse of bureau authorities.” Mr. Patel also vowed to disclose the material to Congress, raising the possibility that Mr. Smith would be questioned about the sedition hunters on Thursday.
The last time Mr. Smith testified — in the closed-door session — he spoke freely about the charges he filed accusing Mr. Trump of seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election. But he was more constrained in commenting on the other criminal case he brought, which charged Mr. Trump with illegally holding on to reams of classified materials after leaving the White House in 2021.
He will face the same prohibition in his testimony on Thursday given that the expansive report he wrote about the documents case remains under seal because of an order issued by Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump appointee who oversaw the proceeding.
Her order expires on Feb. 24, but Mr. Trump has been trying to prevent the report from seeing the light of day. On Tuesday, his lawyers asked Judge Cannon to permanently keep it under wraps, arguing that its release would “improperly endorse” Mr. Smith’s “unlawful investigation and prosecution” of the case and “irreparably harm President Trump.”
Mr. Smith was appointed in late 2022 to oversee the investigations, but he dropped both cases after Mr. Trump was elected to a second term, citing court rulings that prevented prosecution of a sitting president.
The House Judiciary Committee has already made a criminal referral of one of Mr. Smith’s top deputies, Thomas Windom, to the Justice Department for not fully answering similar questions. Mr. Windom, now Mr. Smith’s law partner, has denied wrongdoing.
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.
The post Jack Smith to Testify Before Congress on Trump Investigations appeared first on New York Times.
