WASHINGTON — Former special counsel Jack Smith forcefully defended his prosecutions of U.S. President Donald Trump and his investigative tactics, pushing back against repeated Republican criticism in a congressional hearing Tuesday that featured a senator’s bungled attempt to accuse him of lying about a basketball game. The hearing offered a forum for Republicans to try to paint Smith as a political operative and assail him anew for what they contend were politicized prosecutions that unfolded during the 2024 presidential race. Democrats rallied in his defence, eliciting testimony on the legal and factual basis for the criminal cases against the then-candidate and decrying the Trump administration’s firing of prosecutors involved in the investigations. Smith, for his part, defended his work in an hours-long Senate Judiciary Committee hearing -- the latest congressional effort to revisit federal cases that accused Trump of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 race and of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “Anybody who has worked with me and knows me during the course of my career knows that I would not let politics play a role. And I would just add that if you knew the people I worked with, they would not either,” Smith said. He lamented what he called an unprecedented assault on the rule of law by the Trump administration, along with terminations of his team that he said had deprived the government of crucial expertise and made the country less safe. “That has never happened in my career. I have never seen anything remotely like it in any Republican or Democratic administration,” he said. An effort to accuse Smith of perjury backfires The testimony did nothing to appease Smith’s Republican critics, including Sen. Eric Schmitt, who called Smith a “dirtbag” and a “villain” as he addressed him. The Missouri senator was also at the centre of the hearing’s most memorable moment and gaffe, when he asked Smith whether he recalled attending a professional basketball game in Atlanta in February 2024, around the time Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was facing scrutiny for her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, the special state prosecutor she hired for the county’s election-interference case against Trump. Smith appeared perplexed by the question, which tried to make an unsubstantiated link between federal and state prosecutions of Trump. “I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta,” Smith said. “I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that.” At that point, staffers held up posterboard displaying text messages that, according to Schmitt, purported to show communications about Smith’s attendance at an NBA game between the hometown Atlanta Hawks and the Golden State Warriors. “I think you’ve already perjured yourself,” Schmitt said. The confusion appeared resolved minutes later when Smith volunteered that he indeed had gone to a basketball game in February 2024 -- an Iowa Hawkeyes women’s matchup at the University of Maryland that had nothing to do with the Atlanta Hawks. “Could it then be that the University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes? Could that be it?” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said as she chided Schmitt. “That might be the confusion over the names of the team. But perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully.” The hearing focused heavily on subpoenas for lawmakers’ phone records Smith was pressed by Republican senators about his access to the phone records of GOP lawmakers as he investigated Trump’s efforts to reverse his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Prosecutors issued subpoenas for toll records of numerous Republican members of Congress who were contacted by Trump or his aides on Jan. 6, 2021, the day supporters of the president rioted inside the U.S. Capitol. Smith has said such subpoenas are common in investigations and were necessary in this instance to understand the “scope of the conspiracy” between Trump and his Republican allies. The subpoenas, he said Tuesday, provided corroborating evidence that Trump and his alleged co-conspirators sought to exploit the violence of the day by invoking it to try to further delay the congressional certification of Biden’s win. “They were taking the fact that law enforcement officers had been brutally assaulted at this institution and using that to seek to delay the proceedings further in violation of the law,” Smith said. Toll records reveal the date, time and duration of phone calls between two parties but not the content of the communications. There is no legal prohibition against obtaining the toll records of members of Congress, and Democrats noted that the first Trump administration Justice Department had sought records for representatives of their party during an investigation. Nonetheless, the revelation that Smith’s team secretly obtained the records has animated Republican lawmakers, who consider it proof of overreach by the Biden administration Justice Department and the hard-charging prosecutor it picked as special counsel. Smith pointed out that he had consulted with the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. In July, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, referred Smith to the Justice Department for potential prosecution on allegations he lied at a previous hearing about the records collection -- something Smith and his attorneys vigorously dispute. “I stand by my testimony before the House of Representatives,” Smith said Tuesday. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the president or others.” Smith faced bitingly personal criticism from Republicans Smith was appointed by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to lead investigations into Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss and Trump’s retention of classified documents. Smith abandoned the prosecutions after Trump’s 2024 win, citing Justice Department opinions that sitting presidents cannot be federally indicted. Smith has remained a top target of retribution for Trump. Republicans on the committee followed that lead, confronting him in a hearing that frequently devolved into partisan sniping and name-calling. They sought to cast the prosecutions as a political fishing expedition, accusing Smith of bending procedures in pursuit of Trump. “The Smith election case ultimately wasn’t just about Trump,” said Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the committee chairman. “It was about partisan agents and prosecutors mapping out the Republican apparatus.” During one tense exchange, Republican Sen. John Kennedy grew exasperated as he asked whether the Biden White House instructed the Justice Department to prosecute Trump. Smith said he had “no idea about that,” and that the decision to prosecute Trump was his own. In an effort to depict Smith as evasive, Kennedy asked him if he believed in the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny. Smith said no. “You make me want to throw up in my mouth,” Kennedy said. Democrats, by contrast, used the hearing to affirm the legitimacy of the Trump investigations and produce testimony on the scope of criminal conduct that Smith says he and his team found. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the committee’s top Democrat, accused Republicans of spreading “baseless conspiracy theories” about Smith’s investigations in an effort to “whitewash” the history of Trump’s election loss and the subsequent Capitol attack. “The aspersions cast on Mr. Smith, nonstop, are petty, personal and political. They are nothing but a smoke screen to distract from the president’s own clear, unlawful conduct,” Durbin said. Eric Tucker And Alanna Durkin Richer, The Associated Press
