Jack Smith says he had “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump illegally tried to overturn the 2020 election and hid classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.
The revelation was part of a damning deposition released Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee, which held a closed-door meeting with Trump’s former special prosecutor earlier this month.
Smith, 56, further alleged that his prosecutors “developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office” in 2021 and stored them in a bathroom and ballroom in his South Florida estate.
“The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions,” he said.
Smith’s pair of federal probes—a classified documents case in Florida, and an electoral obstruction case in Washington, D.C.—were ultimately dropped when Trump won the 2024 election.
The 79-year-old president has slammed the probes a “witch hunt,” but Smith maintains that Trump would have been convicted had the cases gone to trial.
“The timing and speed of our work reflect the strength of the evidence and our confidence that we would have secured convictions at trial,” Smith said.
Smith has become a top MAGA foe, but he told lawmakers that—given the evidence provided—he would have accepted the job to prosecute a former president regardless of party. He said that right-wing claims of bias “are false and misleading,” and he slammed the president for vilifying anyone involved in probing him.
“I am both saddened and angered that President Trump has sought revenge against career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff simply for doing their jobs and for having worked on those cases,” Smith said. “These dedicated public servants are the best of us, and they have been wrongly vilified and improperly dismissed from their jobs.”
He continued, “We took our actions based on the facts and the law, the very lessons I learned early in my career as a prosecutor. We followed Justice Department policies and observed legal requirements.”
The White House did not respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
Smith’s deposition spanned eight hours. A transcript shows he was grilled by lawmakers over the twin criminal investigations into Trump. The president has suggested that he plans to turn the tables on Smith and prosecute him for supposedly weaponizing the Justice Department against him—a baseless claim.
Democrats, including Rep. Jamie Raskin, praised Smith for his handling of the deposition.
“Jack Smith has just spent several hours schooling the Judiciary Committee on the professional responsibilities of a prosecutor and the ethical duties of a prosecutor,” Raskin said after the Dec. 17 deposition.
Rep. Dan Goldman, a Democrat from New York, joined Smith’s lawyers in demanding that the deposition be made public—something the committee honored on New Year’s Eve. The transcript showed Smith repeatedly batting down any suggestion that his prosecution of Trump was politically motivated.
“I would never take orders from a political leader to hamper another person in an election,” Smith said. “That’s not who I am.”
Smith reminded lawmakers that many Republicans were key contributors to his dual probes.
“We had numerous witnesses who would say, ‘I voted for President Trump. I campaigned for Trump, President Trump. I wanted him to win,’” Smith said.
He continued, listing GOP witnesses. “The Speaker of the House in Arizona. The Speaker of the House in Michigan. We had an elector in Pennsylvania who is a former Congressman who was going to be an elector for President Trump who said that what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal.”
Smith said Republicans were the central piece to their entire case.
“Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party,” he said. “And so the President got information from people he trusted on other issues. He rejected it whenever it didn’t fit him staying in office. And there was a pattern in our case where any time any information came in that would mean he could no longer be president, he would reject it. And any theory, no matter how far-fetched, no matter how not based in law, that would indicate that he could, he latched on to that.”
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