Former special counsel Jack Smith told the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington on Tuesday that he stands by his decision to prosecute President Donald Trump and would bring the same charges again regardless of party.
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” Smith told the committee. “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,” he said, according to his prepared remarks.
The hearing, titled “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters,” pitted Smith against Republicans who have sought criminal charges against him. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the president or others,” he said.
Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the committee’s Republican chairman, said the election case “wasn’t just about Trump” but “about partisan agents and prosecutors mapping out the Republican apparatus.” Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the panel’s top Democrat, accused Republicans of spreading “baseless conspiracy theories” to “whitewash” the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, calling the attacks on Smith “nothing but a smoke screen to distract from the president’s own clear, unlawful conduct.”
An exchange with Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri faltered after Schmitt cited text messages he said placed Smith at an Atlanta Hawks game on Feb. 3, 2024, suggesting a link to the Georgia prosecution of Trump. Smith said he recalled attending a University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball game in the Washington area that day, a recollection matching a game played that date. Senator Amy Klobuchar said Schmitt should apologize; Schmitt, who called Smith a “dirtbag,” stood by the remark, and his office did not respond to a request for comment.
Republicans pressed Smith over subpoenas for lawmakers’ phone records, known as toll records, which show dates and durations of calls but not their content. Smith called the practice “common practice” in investigations and said it was needed to establish “the scope of the conspiracy,” and said secrecy orders around the records “were not predicated on the idea that members of Congress...would commit acts of obstruction” but on “a real concern that Donald Trump and his associates would do that because they had done it, and they did it again.”
Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the House Judiciary chairman, has referred Smith to the Justice Department for potential prosecution, arguing Smith misled Congress in a December 2025 exchange by saying the records he sought included no communications content. Jordan cited documents showing Smith obtained the content of 44 lawmakers’ text messages through a separate subpoena to the National Archives; Smith’s lawyers called his answers “unimpeachably truthful” and said he was asked only about toll records.
Asked about the phone records of Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Smith said Graham “was not a target of our investigation. In fact, he likely would have been a witness in our case,” adding that Graham had investigated Trump’s voter-fraud claims and “found them to be false.”
Smith said career employees fired from his investigations had been “targeted illegally, lost their jobs illegally,” calling them “heroes,” and said the Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential immunity ruling “can be very dangerous for the rule of law.” He closed his opening statement by saying, “Fear may be contagious; courage is as well.”
Trump’s 2024 election victory ended both cases: Smith, appointed in 2022 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, dropped the election-interference and classified-documents indictments under Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president. Trump pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing, called his Jan. 6 rally remarks “totally appropriate” and granted mass clemency to defendants on returning to office; Smith has said he believes a jury would have convicted Trump and rejected as “laughable” the notion his decisions were directed by the Biden administration.
The Justice Department has since purged officials involved in past Trump investigations, revoked the security clearances of Smith’s lawyers and opened an Office of Special Counsel review of him. A “grand conspiracy” investigation of federal law enforcement actions dating to 2016 was also launched. Judge Aileen Cannon’s order blocking release of the classified-documents volume of Smith’s report limited what he could discuss Tuesday, and the Justice Department has brought no charges against him.