After a series of congressional hearings, years of public debate and countless conspiracy theories, it’s easy to forget why Republicans went after former special counsel Jack Smith in the first place.
In June 2023, Smith and his team unveiled a multicount criminal indictment against Donald Trump as part of the then-former president’s classified documents scandal. Two months later, Smith went further, presenting a second criminal indictment against the Republican, highlighting the alleged felonies Trump committed while trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Trump’s GOP allies didn’t just condemn the cases and ignore the voluminous evidence, they also concocted a bizarre counternarrative: Smith might look like an experienced and capable prosecutor, they said, but he’s actually part of a secret plot hell-bent on destroying Trump by way of an unjust, illegitimate and inherently abusive process.
Indeed, the party and its allies were so committed to this counternarrative that Republican officials launched a multifaceted investigation, ostensibly to prove their baseless claims about the former special counsel and his integral role in an indefensible “witch hunt.”
With this in mind, when Smith appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee — his third such appearance before a GOP-led panel since late last year — he began by focusing on the ostensible point of the hearing: his work.
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” the prosecutor said in his opening remarks. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat. … The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence.”
The written remarks made sense, not because they were accurate but because Smith assumed he was there to defend the substance of his efforts during his tenure as special counsel. But that assumption wasn’t altogether correct — because Republicans didn’t seem especially interested in contesting his criminal cases against the president at all.
Judiciary Committee Republicans did little Tuesday to challenge the substance of Smith’s criminal case against Trump for seeking to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Smith reinforced his contention that Trump mounted an unprecedented criminal assault on the transfer of power, seeking to derail Joe Biden’s victory and then capitalizing on the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol — unleashed by a mob of his supporters — to further that goal.
Smith also defended the work of his staff and decried the Trump-led Justice Department’s decision to fire them as “illegal.” And he made his most forceful case yet that the probe he led was actually fueled by Republican witnesses who broke from Trump over his handling of the 2020 election.
”It’s very hard to understand how our investigation can be viewed as partisan when the strongest witnesses, the people who were the difference between the rule of law and not, were Republicans,” Smith explained.
GOP senators raised concerns about investigatory procedures and did their best to smear the former special counsel in personal terms. But across three separate hearings, House and Senate Republicans at no point suggested that Trump was innocent of the criminal charges he faced.
It’s not that the president’s allies made an effort but fell short; it’s that these partisans didn’t even try to make the case that the president never committed those alleged felonies — which speaks volumes about the merits of the underlying cases.
One Republican member of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, said he believed the investigation into Smith had run its course in Congress.
“At this point, I think we kind of know what we know,” he told Politico after the hearing.
And what we know is that the lengthy partisan crusade against Smith and the former special counsel’s office was a profound waste of time and resources.
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