Under Republican Fire, Ex-Special Counsel Jack Smith Defends His Trump Probes at Senate Hearing

Jack Smith spent Tuesday trading barbs with Republican senators at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, where the former US special counsel vigorously defended the investigations he mounted into President Donald Trump and dismissed claims that prosecutors on his team went after the Republican Party as a political weapon. Republican lawmakers, in turn, accused him of stretching and abusing the extraordinary powers of his office.

The witness was sworn in on Capitol Hill less than a year after leaving the Justice Department, and his appearance immediately became a test of congressional oversight of a probe that ended without a single conviction in any of the four criminal cases it generated. Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, was appointed special counsel in 2022 to examine allegations about Trump's conduct after the conclusion of his first term in office.

Asked to justify the decision to file criminal charges, Smith said his team assembled evidence establishing, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Trump committed serious crimes against the United States. He insisted the probe was not shaped by politics and said the case rested on evidence rather than political calculation — a formulation that set the stage for hours of contentious questioning from the committee's Republican members.

Smith brought two of the four indictments himself in 2023. One alleged attempts to subvert the 2020 presidential election; the other concerned Trump's handling of classified material while out of office. Both cases were later dropped without trial after Trump returned to the White House in 2024.

Two additional indictments were brought by other prosecutors. In New York, Trump was accused of falsifying business records to conceal unflattering information dating from his 2016 campaign. A separate Georgia case also concerned allegations that Trump and his allies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 vote. Of all four, only the New York indictment reached a courtroom, producing felony convictions; the remainder were abandoned following Trump's re-election.

Smith resigned shortly before Trump's second inauguration in January 2025, a move that coincided with a long-standing Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president. Trump has denied the charges against him throughout, and has blamed Smith and former President Joe Biden for what he has repeatedly described as a political "witch-hunt".

Much of Tuesday's confrontation centred not on the underlying evidence but on the methods used to gather it. Republicans focused in particular on subpoenas that pulled phone records belonging to members of Congress and financial information from Republican donors and political organisations — steps they portrayed as an indiscriminate fishing expedition.

Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said Smith's team used its investigations to "map out and target the entire Republican Party". Smith countered that his office had an obligation to pursue evidence wherever it led, and repeatedly returned to the argument that the investigation was grounded in legitimate sources and lawful process.

The sharpest exchanges came over surveillance of lawmakers. Smith said the phone records helped corroborate evidence that Trump and his allies reached out to members of Congress in an effort to delay certification of the 2020 election results. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose own records were among those sought, demanded to know why lawmakers were not notified when the subpoenas went out. Smith answered that prosecutors feared disclosure could allow Trump and his associates to destroy evidence or otherwise interfere with the investigation.

"Is it a crime to be a Republican?" Cruz asked. "Absolutely not," Smith replied. Smith also said his office consulted the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section before obtaining the records — a step designed to reassure the committee that political considerations were screened out of the process.

The records themselves are narrow. According to the article, they reveal the timing and duration of telephone calls but not their content — a distinction critics have seized on, noting that there was no law prohibiting prosecutors from seeking such data during the course of the investigation.

Beyond defending the past, Smith used the hearing to go on the offensive, accusing the Trump administration of retaliating against the prosecutors and agents who worked on the two cases. He said members of his former team were dismissed for "doing their jobs", and those firings have generated a series of legal challenges.

In March, three former FBI agents who had worked on the investigation of Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 election filed a class-action lawsuit alleging they were illegally terminated as part of a "retribution campaign". The suit seeks their reinstatement, and remains a live test of the department's commitment to insulating career personnel from political pressure.

Smith, who said Trump has threatened to send him to prison, framed the scrutiny of his work as part of a much larger struggle over the independence of the Justice Department. "As I appear before you today," he told the committee, "it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime." He added that he would not be silenced by what he described as continued threats of prosecution from the president or others.

The hearing left the core questions unresolved. With every federal case against Trump now closed, the debate has shifted from whether the investigations were legally sound to who bears accountability for the methods they employed — a contest that will play out in the pending retaliation lawsuits and in any congressional inquiry into prosecutorial independence that follows.