Jack Smith Testifies That He’d Prosecute Trump All Over Again |
Former special counsel Jack Smith defended his investigations into President Donald Trump in a closed-door hearing with the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday, pushing back against Trump’s repeated attempts to delegitimize and undermine Smith’s findings.
“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether the President was a Republican or Democrat,” Smith said in his opening statement, according to multiple news organizations who received copies of the remarks.
“The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions, as alleged in the indictments returned by grand juries in two different districts,” he continued.
Smith, like anyone else who’s ever tried to hold Trump to account, has been facing a pressure campaign from the president. Recently, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared a story from Fox News claiming that the FBI initially doubted that there was probable cause for the Mar-a-Lago raid, something that might matter if a federal judge hadn’t signed off on the search warrant, and if over 100 classified documents weren’t indeed found all over Trump’s estate.
And Republicans snuck a petty provision into the shutdown deal allowing Senate Republicans who had their phone records accessed by Smith—in order to see who may have been involved with Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election—to sue the Justice Department for millions.
Republicans rejected Smith’s request to testify publicly about his investigations into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his plot to overturn the election. But in Wednesday’s closed-door hearing, Smith still refused to let the Trump administration undermine his findings.
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power,” Smith said in his remarks. “Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.
“He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents,” Smith added.
According to Smith, no matter what Trump claims, the cases against him are rock solid.
The U.S. military has conducted at least 25 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific on the basis that the small watercraft were trying to smuggle drugs into the United States. But as it turns out, even top Trump officials don’t think that’s true.
So far, at least 95 people have been killed since the attacks began in early September. The White House has defended the violence, chalking it up to allegedly necessary efforts to thwart the pipeline of fentanyl into the country. Donald Trump has simultaneously leveraged the aggression to try to shove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power, something that he attempted and failed to do in 2019.
Yet America’s senators are hearing an entirely different rationale for the military offensive. Recalling details of a classified meeting held Tuesday, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio admitted that no fentanyl is coming out of Venezuela. Instead, the boats are carrying cocaine—bound for Europe.
“I can tell you this,” Murphy said, noting he wasn’t discussing classified information. “The administration had no legal justification and had no national security justification for these strikes.
“And so we are spending billions of your taxpayer dollars to wage a war in the Caribbean to stop cocaine from going from Venezuela to Europe,” he said. “That is a massive waste of national security resources and your taxpayer dollars.”
Murphy underscored that Trump had overstepped his authority by attempting to use the seemingly fabricated drug threat to wage war against Venezuela without the express permission of Congress.
“Only Congress, only the American public, can authorize war,” he said. “And there is just no question that these are acts of war.”
Another Republican is retiring from Congress, in what is becoming an exodus before next year’s midterm elections.
Representative Dan Newhouse, whose Washington district is a safe Republican seat, announced Wednesday morning that he would not be running for reelection in 2026. Newhouse, who voted for President Trump’s impeachment after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, had survived primary challenges to his seat in 2022 and 2024.
Newhouse was also one of 35 Republicans who voted to establish the January 6 commission to investigate the Capitol insurrection, so it’s telling that after surviving two elections after that, he now thinks his time is up. Newhouse’s retirement means that only one Republican who voted to impeach Trump in Congress, Representative David Valadao of California, remains in office, although he has a tough election in a battleground district.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a strong supporter turned critic of the president, announced her own resignation last month. She told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Tuesday night that she thinks “the dam is breaking” regarding........