Former special counsel Jack Smith delivered a forceful defense of his prosecutorial record before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, pushing back hard against Republican attacks.
Smith testified that he and his team acted without political motivation in bringing criminal cases against former President Donald Trump across two separate federal investigations.
“I made those decisions without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election,” Smith told the committee during the hearing at the Hart Senate Office Building.
Smith added that the evidence his team gathered met the highest legal standard, stating his investigation “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation.”
He said he would make the same prosecutorial decisions again regardless of whether the subject was a Republican or a Democrat, offering an unambiguous defense of the investigations.
The hours-long hearing revisited the two federal cases against Trump, which accused him of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results and of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Both cases were abandoned following Trump’s 2024 presidential election victory, but Smith used Tuesday’s testimony to reaffirm that the legal basis for both prosecutions remained sound.
Smith told lawmakers that the rule of law itself is now under threat, stating “individuals are threatened with criminal prosecution because they are perceived to have opposed the president.”
“It is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime,” Smith said, delivering one of the hearing’s most pointed statements directed at the current administration.
Smith also told the committee that career prosecutors who worked on the Trump investigations have since been illegally fired, adding another layer of controversy to the proceedings.
Republicans spent much of the hearing attempting to frame Smith’s work as a partisan political operation, with committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa arguing the prosecution “was about partisan agents and prosecutors mapping out the Republican apparatus.”
Sen. John Kennedy told Smith bluntly: “You make me want to throw up in my mouth,” capturing the sharp hostility from the Republican side of the dais throughout the session.
The hearing’s most awkward moment came when Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri accused Smith of committing perjury over his attendance at an Atlanta Hawks basketball game in 2024, setting up a dramatic but ultimately embarrassing exchange.
Smith testified that while he had attended a basketball game on the date in question, it was a women’s college game in College Park, Maryland, between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes, with U.S. Marshals accompanying him.
It emerged that Schmitt had confused the names of basketball teams, effectively undermining his own perjury accusation and handing Democrats an unexpected moment to highlight what they called Republican overreach.
Democrats on the committee rallied to Smith’s defense throughout the day, eliciting detailed testimony about the legal and factual foundations underpinning the criminal cases brought against Trump.
Republicans separately criticized Smith for obtaining lawmakers’ phone records in connection with the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack, a practice Smith defended as producing powerful corroborating evidence.
Smith said those subpoenas provided evidence that Trump and his alleged co-conspirators sought to exploit the violence of January 6 to further delay congressional certification of the 2020 election results.
