Former special counsel Jack Smith, who filed charges against US President Donald Trump without trial in two separate cases, denounced “false and misleading narratives” in his first public congressional testimony about his investigation.
Smith in 2010 He was appointed by the US Department of Justice to take over two preliminary investigations of Trump after he announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2024. But despite that important post, the former prosecutor did Relatively few public comments Without legal documents until Thursday.
“President Trump is impeached because the evidence shows he willfully violated the laws he took an oath to uphold,” Smith said.
If I were asked today whether to impeach a former president based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Democrat or a Republican.
Smith and his team were ultimately charged with conspiring to overturn Trump’s 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, and with deliberately withholding classified documents in 2023.
Trump, for his part, issued various statements against Smith, who previously worked in the federal government under both Republican and Democratic administrations, calling him a “radical left-wing Marxist prosecutor” and a “sick puppy.” Tuesday at the White House.
Earlier this month, Trump and the White House issued one. Alternate history In the year January 6, 2021 Capitol riots, culmination of weeks of election protests.
“Our assessment of the evidence is that he is most responsible for what happened on January 6,” Smith said in response to a question from Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. Criticize the Republican lawmakers for the theater And trying to discredit the previous special counsel.
Republicans ready to testify: Smith
Smith The Office of the Special Counsel is facing.Several officials who have angered Trump in the past have faced charges or investigations just one year into his second term, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
Trump on Thursday called for Smith to be “impeached” on social media without providing evidence of “massive perjury.” Trump said his comments were based on Smith’s testimony. .
During that testimony, Smith said he believed Trump’s Justice Department would find a way to impeach him.
Donald Trump After losing the 2020 election, they engaged in an ‘unprecedented criminal effort’ to ‘retain power illegally,’ special counsel Jack Smith said in a report released by the US Department of Justice.
Republican lawmakers tried to discredit Smith’s investigation as an abuse of the legal system and a sign of an underarmed Justice Department under Biden.
“It’s always been about politics,” Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said at the start of the hearing. “They were willing to do anything to get Donald Trump.”
But Smith said he was under no pressure from the White House to impeach Trump or then-Attorney General Merrick Garland from the Biden administration.
In closed-door testimony before the same committee last month, Smith said that if the election case goes to trial, prosecutors at the federal and state levels are prepared to testify against many Republicans who want Trump to win.
Former Attorney General William Barr previously told a congressional committee that Trump’s fraud claims were “outrageous.”
Trump has repeatedly pleaded not guilty to all charges and has argued that the charges are aimed at damaging his 2024 campaign.
Justice Department policy prohibits impeachment by the president, and a 2024 U.S. Supreme Court decision — handed down while Smith’s team was preparing the case — severely curtails what activities a president can be investigated for.
The Trump administration has fired dozens of Justice Department lawyers, FBI agents and staffers assigned to work on the investigation, Smith said.
“In my opinion, these people are better than public servants, our country owes them a debt of gratitude, and we are all less safe because these experienced and hardworking law enforcement officers have been relieved of their duties.”
Grilled on getting Republican phone records
In the year Smith has faced a flurry of questions from Republican lawmakers about the group’s judge-approved phone records of more than half a dozen Republican members of Congress who met with the president on the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021.
The records contain information about the participants on the call and how long they stayed, but also about their content. Prosecutors said they followed legal Justice Department procedures in making the requests.
Democrats defended the investigation, saying the records were necessary to probe Trump’s efforts to pressure Republican lawmakers to block the voter’s certification.
“You never tell them in an investigation, ‘Hey, man, we’re going to get your phone records,'” said former federal prosecutor Ted Liu, Democrat of California.
Despite Trump’s denials, judges across the country — including some he appointed to the bench — have set aside dozens of legal challenges brought by the Trump campaign and various surrogates to prevent a Biden victory in key battleground states in 2020.Counts, reviews and audits in battleground states where Trump contested his losses all confirmed a Biden victory.
There was never a coherent explanation between Trump and Biden, who were on the ballot in 2020 and won hundreds of congressional, governor and thousands of other races unscathed or unscathed.
Trump and some of his Republican allies have pushed for expanded use of mail-in ballots in 2020, before the widespread availability of a Covid-19 vaccine, which led to 43 percent of all ballots being cast that year. But the rules don’t favor one candidate, and Trump won the 2024 election, with nearly one in three Americans voting by mail, and more than 20 percent of the vote in the 2016 election.
Smith did not go into detail about the classified documents case — considered by many legal analysts to be the most dangerous of the four criminal charges Trump has ever faced — because The court battle is still going on. In that case, his report on the team’s findings could be made public.
Read Jack Smith’s closed door testimony in December: