Former Special Counsel Jack Smith has no regrets over his efforts to prosecute Donald Trump for alleged crimes committed during and after the president’s first term.
The lawyer, 57, plans to tell MAGA loyalists that he would do it all over again as they haul him in for grilling before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday morning.
“If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether the President was a Republican or a Democrat,” he has written in preprepared remarks for that hearing, which Politico has obtained in advance.
He will argue that his investigations into Trump, 80, whose conviction for falsifying business records makes him the only felon in history to have held the title of U.S. president, “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity.”
The former special counsel was appointed under the Joe Biden administration to oversee a probe into Trump’s alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and his role in the Jan. 6 riots, and a second into claims he kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Trump’s supporters have repeatedly attacked Smith over those investigations, claiming they amounted to political persecution. Top-ranking Republicans and influential conservative pundits say Smith’s efforts were biased and yielded flawed results, with some, including Trump himself, going so far as to suggest the attorney should face jail time.
Smith’s Tuesday appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee marks the third time lawmakers have grilled him about those probes. He twice testified before the House Judiciary Committee last year, when GOP lawmakers accused him of going beyond his remit as special counsel to secure evidence against the president.
Neither of Smith’s investigations made it to trial. A judge threw out the documents case in July 2024, ruling Smith had never been lawfully appointed. He later dropped both cases after Trump won that November, citing the department’s own rules against prosecuting a sitting president.
The lawyer’s written remarks ahead of his Tuesday hearing show he plans to take aim at the second Trump administration for creating “challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime” by regularly threatening the president’s opponents with legal action, according to Politico.
“Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions, and norms,” he will say. “History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It is often weakened by attacks on the institutions and public servants sworn to uphold it.”
The Daily Beast contacted the White House for comment on this story. “Jack Smith is a lying hack who was weaponized by the Biden justice system against President Trump to try and benefit his Democrat cronies,” spokeswoman Lauren Bis said. “Jack Smith was specifically hired to spend years on a witch hunt to compile lies against the President.”
