The former special counsel defended his scrutiny of the president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and handling of classified documents. Republicans are pressing for a Justice Department inquiry of his conduct
September 29, 2026 at 2:46 p.m. EDT
Former special counsel Jack Smith forcefully defended his derailed efforts to prosecute President Donald Trump on Tuesday, telling lawmakers he would not “be silenced by continued threats of prosecution” from the president.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Smith rejected Republican assertions that his investigations of the then-former president were driven by partisanship or were used to improperly surveil GOP lawmakers during the Biden administration.
He said he stood by his decision to charge Trump in two felony indictments during his years out of office, the first focused on his alleged mishandling of classified documents and the second on his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether the president was a Republican or a Democrat,” Smith said.
But with few new insights into his investigations on offer and Republicans intent on pressing old attacks, the proceeding quickly devolved into an opportunity for the former special counsel’s critics to deliver a public tongue-lashing.
“No matter what you say, there’s no legitimate basis for what you did,” committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) piled on, telling Smith he “will go down as a total dirtbag.”
“You have brought the Department of Justice into disrepute,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Sen. John Kennedy (R-Louisiana) told Smith: “You make me want to throw up in my mouth.”
The nearly four-hour flogging left Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) saying he was mystified, as he marveled at the relentlessness of the Republicans’ message.
“This is gaslighting of the American people,” he said, telling Smith, “I am so sorry that they’re attempting to put investigators on trial while ignoring the extraordinary conduct that that they are duty-bound to really investigate.”
But not all of the Republican attacks landed. Schmitt at one point accused Smith of perjury when he said he had not attended an Atlanta Hawks basketball game in February 2024. The senator said he had texts proving otherwise and suggested, with no evidence, that Smith had made a secret trip to Atlanta to meet with Fani T. Willis, the district attorney who prosecuted Trump in Georgia.
Yet, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) deflated Schmitt’s “gotcha” moment in a matter of minutes. After Smith said he had attended a basketball game around that time featuring the Iowa Hawkeyes, Klobuchar suggested Schmitt had mixed up the team names of the Hawks and Hawkeyes and that Smith had not been in Atlanta at all.
“Perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully,” Klobuchar chided her Republican colleague.
Behind those theatrics, Tuesday’s proceedings carried very real stakes for Smith — who Trump has repeatedly said should face prosecution — and the Republican senators, who have sought to reframe the public understanding of the special counsel’s twin probes, both of which he was compelled to abandon after Trump won the 2024 election.
For years, the president and his allies have asserted that Smith and other prosecutors weaponized law enforcement against them and deserve to be punished. Democrats say Trump plainly committed indictable offenses and that it is he who has corruptly turned the Justice Department into a cudgel to target perceived enemies.
“The aspersions cast on Mr. Smith nonstop are petty, personal and political,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (Illinois), the committee’s top Democrat. “They are nothing but a smoke screen to distract from the president’s own clear unlawful conduct.”Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) speaks as photos of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack are shown at Tuesday’s hearing. (Evan Vucci/Reuters)
Smith responded stoically to it all, showing only brief flashes of emotion when Republican lawmakers questioned his wife’s past support for President Barack Obama or sought to vilify members of his former staff of career prosecutors and investigators. Many of them were fired from their Justice Department jobs soon after Trump returned to office last year.
“I’m extremely proud to have worked with them,” Smith told the senators. “The fact that they have been targeted illegally, lost their jobs illegally and had their lives turned upside down by this Department of Justice is an outrage.”
Smith said he, too, expects to face personal consequences and that he believes the Trump administration will do “everything in its power” to try to build a case against him.
After similar testimony earlier this year before the House Judiciary Committee, committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) referred Smith to the Justice Department for potential prosecution, alleging he had lied to Congress. Department officials have said they are reviewing the evidence and have not decided whether to seek an indictment.
Separately, federal prosecutors in Florida earlier this month subpoenaed former FBI agents involved in the 2022 raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate that led to Smith’s classified documents case against Trump. Those interviews are part of a broader “grand conspiracy” probe pursued by the Justice Department under a vague legal theory that Biden and Obama-era officials engaged in a decade-long conspiracy to violate Trump’s civil rights.
“The rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime,” Smith said. “Individuals are threatened with criminal prosecutions because they are perceived to have opposed the president. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions and norms.”
Nonetheless, Smith lobbied for months for the opportunity to publicly address lawmakers Tuesday and defend his investigations’ conclusions that Trump committed felony crimes.
Smith is sworn in by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). (Nathan Howard/Reuters)
That said, his testimony was somewhat limited by strict secrecy rules that barred him from answering many questions about grand jury interviews or materials. He also said he was restricted in what he could discuss about his team’s investigation of Trump’s handling of classified documents because of a court ruling on a final report he drafted summarizing his findings.
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who oversaw that case, has permanently barred the report’s release and blocked officials from discussing its contents with those outside the Justice Department.
Still, Smith forcefully defended his team’s investigative methods, including criticism of subpoenas they issued to secretly review phone records of several GOP lawmakers as part of the investigation into Trump’s actions in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Grassley described those requests as a “rampant abuse of authority.” Cruz tried to paint them and others, which provided information on donations from some Trump allies, as a “fishing expedition” to broadly investigate Republicans.
“Is it a crime to be a Republican?” Cruz demanded at one point.
Smith flatly responded: “Absolutely not.”
He maintained those requests were essential to tracking phone calls made from the White House that day to Trump’s allies in Congress as he sought to delay certification of the 2020 election results.
The records included the times and lengths of lawmakers’ phone calls and text messages, but did not disclose the contents of any senators’ communications.
The Justice Department has since revealed that Smith also obtained incidental text messages from 44 lawmakersas part of a separate subpoena to the National Archives and Records Administration seeking information on several White House affiliated phones.
Smith said Tuesday that Trump was to blame for the need to obtain that information in the first place, given his unprecedented actions as Congress was preparing to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
“It was an important part of our investigation,” he said, “and it was centrally relevant to the issue of [Trump’s] criminal intent.”
Asked by Sen. Darline Graham (R-South Carolina), sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, why Smith sought phone records from him and other lawmakers under a provision that ensured they would not be notified of the subpoenas, Smith praised the late Republican for his initial candor on Trump’s false election claims following Jan. 6.
“I believe your brother was a patriotic public servant,” Smith replied. “He was not a target of our investigation and, in fact, he likely would have been a witness in our case” against Trump.
That brief moment of comity came near the end of a proceeding otherwise dominated by political rancor. But at least one Republican questioned Tuesday whether his party truly held the moral high ground.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) pointed to the Justice Department’s recent charges against former FBI Director James B. Comey over a picture of seashells arranged to say “86 47,″ which prosecutors say amounted to a threat on the president’s life. Trump is the 47th president, and “86″ can mean to get rid of someone — or purportedly is mob slang for killing someone.
“I find it interesting that people think they’re the only party that is right and righteous on this,” Tillis said Tuesday. “Probably not the right way to spend our time.”
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