Jack Smith accepts invitation to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee
Almost immediately after Election Day 2024, special counsel Jack Smith and his team grudgingly wrapped up their work — not because they wanted to or because they lacked compelling evidence, but because of Justice Department guidelines against prosecuting a sitting president, and Donald Trump had just won.
Left without options, Smith resigned, and his criminal indictments against the president effectively evaporated.
As the prosecutor exited the stage, he did so in relative silence. In fact, Smith said so little during and in the immediate aftermath of his Trump investigations that many didn’t even know what his voice sounded like. For months, he simply allowed his work to do the talking.
Now, however, the former special counsel has made the transition from a lawyer who preferred silence to one who has quite a bit to say. Politico reported:
Jack Smith, the former special counsel who brought criminal charges against President Donald Trump, will testify Sept. 22 before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Lawyers for Smith confirmed in a Monday letter to Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) that their client would appear before the panel, pending approval from the Justice Department to do so. Grassley had delivered the invitation to testify earlier in the day, as first reported by POLITICO.
“During the investigation of President Trump, Mr. Smith steadfastly followed Justice Department policies, observed applicable legal requirements, and took actions based on the acts and the law,” Smith’s lawyers wrote. “He stands by the decisions he made as Special Counsel and looks forward to the opportunity to appear before your Committee in a public hearing to correct the many mischaracterizations of his tenure.”
There’s no great secret as to what GOP senators want to talk about: Grassley and other Republicans on the committee have spent months insisting that Smith improperly obtained information about members’ communications as part of the investigation known as the “Arctic Frost” probe.
Those claims were discredited months ago, but Republicans seem determined to go after Smith anyway, in part because they’re intent to rewrite the recent past and in part because the party doesn’t appear to have anything else it wants to talk about ahead of the midterm elections.
As the GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee prepare for the hearing, however, part of their process should be to lower their expectations.
After all, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee also seemed to think they could get the better of Smith during two separate hearings, and the prosecutor ended up embarrassing them, leaving GOP members with little more than questions about why they thought this would be a good idea.
(House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan recently referred the former special counsel to the Justice Department for possible prosecution, but the request was laughable on its face.)
As for Smith, it seems the former special counsel is making up for lost time, speaking out in bold ways after his prolonged silence.
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Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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