Updated January 22, 2026 at 3:11 PM CST
Former special counsel Jack Smith on Thursday defended his decision to secure two criminal indictments against President Trump and asserted his team had gathered enough evidence to convict.
Smith gave his first public testimony about his work Thursday, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee. Republican members of the panel attacked Smith's move to collect phone records of lawmakers who had been in contact with Trump allies around the time of the Capitol riot in 2021. And they cast the historic investigations of Trump as politically motivated.
"It was always about politics and to get President Trump, they were willing to do almost anything," said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the panel's chairman.
"I am not a politician and I have no partisan loyalties," Smith responded. "My office didn't spy on anyone."
Neither of Smith's cases reached a jury before Trump won the election and returned to the White House last year.
In a videotaped deposition, Smith said the president had only himself to blame, for charges he tried to overturn the will of voters in 2020.
"The evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy," Smith said in the deposition, which congressional Republicans released on New Year's Eve. "These crimes were committed for his benefit."
Smith said the violent attack at the U.S. Capitol, which injured 140 law enforcement officers, would not have happened, except for Trump. He said he could not understand the president's mass pardon of members of the Capitol mob on Trump's first day in office and predicted many of them would commit new crimes in the years ahead.
"No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account," Smith told lawmakers Thursday. "So that is what I did."
He's been eager to defend the work of prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the investigations of the president. Most of those people were fired after Trump returned to power.
Asked about regrets or mistakes, Smith said if anything, he would have expressed more appreciation for members of his team, who "sacrificed" so much during their government service.
Trump suggests DOJ should probe Smith
During the hearing, Trump posted on Truth Social that Smith was being "decimated" by Republican questions.
"Jack Smith is a deranged animal, who shouldn't be allowed to practice Law," Trump wrote. "Hopefully the Attorney General is looking at what he's done, including some of the crooked and corrupt witnesses that he was attempting to use in his case against me."
Smith declined an opportunity to respond directly to the president's words from the witness table, but he said he fully expected the Trump Justice Department to find a way to punish him. The DOJ has already moved to bring criminal charges against two of the president's perceived foes.
"I will not be intimidated," Smith said.
Trump has promised at different times to launch a criminal investigation into Jack Smith or even throw him out of the country.
One area where Smith tread carefully is the investigation into classified documents the FBI found in a ballroom, a bathroom, and an office at Trump's Florida resort. A second volume of Smith's final report that concerns that episode has been blocked from release by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who oversaw the case, but media organizations and nonprofit groups have pushed to release it.
Trump's personal lawyer made a fresh plea this week to keep those findings secret. The president argues that Smith's report contains grand jury and privileged materials that would hurt Trump's constitutional and privacy rights if released.
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