Smith performed honorably, but no one person or investigation can protect America from Trump.
Former US special counsel Jack Smith is sworn in before he testifies before the House Judiciary Committee about his investigations into President Donald Trump.
(Alex Wroblewski / AFP via Getty Images)
The New York Times said he appeared “wan and tired” on Thursday. I wouldn’t have described former special counsel Jack Smith that way; maybe “depressed.” But maybe that’s projection. Smith has been defiantly asking House Republicans to let him testify publicly about his investigations and indictments of Donald Trump. On Thursday, rather unexpectedly, they allowed it. Also unexpectedly, he did not seem defiant. He seemed resigned to the futility of his cause, and the likelihood that he and his colleagues would continue to be persecuted, if not prosecuted, for their work.
That depressed me. It shouldn’t have. We already knew Smith had to drop his cases against Trump when, unbelievably, the American people made him president again, despite widespread evidence of the disgraced, twice-impeached huckster’s many crimes. The House January 6 Select Committee laid a lot of it out publicly. Smith, even after dropping his cases, made his investigative findings public in a brutal report last year. He testified privately before the House Judiciary Committee on December 17, and over the holidays Republicans released a transcript and video of that appearance, which also laid out the foundations of his very thorough case against Trump. I wasn’t sure why House Republicans decided to let Smith testify publicly on Thursday; some news analysts suggested perhaps they were laying a perjury trap for him, trying to give corrupt Attorney General Pam Bondi ammunition to prosecute him.
Trump apparently hoped so too. Mid-testimony, he posted on social media: “Jack Smith is a deranged animal, who shouldn’t be allowed to practice Law” and suggested that “hopefully” Bondi is “looking at what he’s done.”
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If so, she probably didn’t find much, if anything (not that truth matters to Trump or his minions). Smith carefully repeated a lot of his December testimony, sometimes verbatim. He didn’t respond to Republican derision or Democratic praise. He seemed, to be honest, defeated. Which I guess he is.
I’m not saying he pulled any punches. “Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused January 6, that it was foreseeable to him and that he sought to exploit the violence,” he told the committee. He went on: “No one should be above the law in this country, and the law required that [Trump] be held to account. So that is what I did.”
Smith continued: “I have seen how the rule of law can erode. My fear is that we have seen the rule of law function in our country for so long that many of us have come to take it for granted.… The rule of law is not self-executing.” And he acknowledged that the Trump administration would “do everything in their power” to indict him “because they’ve been told to do so by the president.
“I will not be intimidated,” he insisted.
I don’t think he’s been intimidated, but he’s damn sure been discouraged. The closest he came to showing emotion was when he said he wished he’d shown more appreciation for what his investigators had done, since many of them have been fired or are facing investigation for their work on the Trump investigations.
The Republican rabble on the House Judiciary Committee pursued a predictably stupid line of questioning. They were most concerned about Smith’s decision to subpoena the “toll logs” of GOP congresspeople—not wiretaps, not records of their conversations, just whom they’d spoken to and for how long. Various members decried this as “spying,” which it is not. They asked why he didn’t seek the records of any Democrats, a ludicrous question since no Democrats are known or suspected to have talked to Trump or his henchmen like Rudy Giuliani on or before January 6. Smith was looking for the people Trump tried to convince not to confirm the Electoral College count that made Joe Biden president. Democrats were not among them.
They spent a lot of time trashing former deputy to then–chief of staff Mark Meadows, whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson, for her “hearsay” account of Trump lunging at the steering wheel of his SUV, trying to get his Secret Service detail to take him to the Capitol that day. But Hutchinson herself admitted that she had only secondhand accounts of the alleged conflict, and Smith had not even put her on a witness list. Jordan pounced: That meant he had not ruled out calling Hutchinson, who he described as “someone everybody knows is making it up” (I hope her attorneys were watching).
Of course, other parts of Hutchinson’s testimony were corroborated: about Trump’s anger with his Secret Service detail, his obsessive television watching that day, his refusal to tell the rioters to go home until after 4 pm. But Jordan acted like he’d found the smoking gun that destroyed Smith’s whole case: that he hadn’t “ruled out” calling Hutchinson as a witness.
It got no better, or worse, than that.
There were times when Smith’s laconic style worked dramatically. GOP Representative Darrell Issa claimed that the list of Congress members whose phone records he obtained constituted a “Biden political enemies list,” and went on: “They were the enemies of the president and you were their [the administration’s] arm?”
“No,” Smith answered flatly.
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Otherwise, we got little, if any, new information out of the day. The high point for me was the ignorant Texas Representative Troy Nehls trying to blame the January 6 riot on insufficiently prepared Capitol Police, and the disabled officer Michael Fanone pretending to cough while shouting “Fuck you!” Maybe that’s what I wanted from Jack Smith, which is admittedly silly.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison wasn’t speaking directly about Smith or his Thursday testimony when he told reporters, on the eve of a dramatic Minneapolis general strike to protest the brutal ICE invasion there, “We will not save our country in a courtroom.… ultimately, this country will be saved by the people of the United States. And so that—you protesting, you gathering evidence, you sharing it with us, you communicating with us—is action. It’s actually how we’re going to win.”
It’s the only way we’re going to win against Trump, although Jack Smith did his best to make him pay for his crimes.
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