{"id":148822,"date":"2026-01-25T09:52:21","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T09:52:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/148822\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T09:52:21","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T09:52:21","slug":"i-will-not-be-intimidated-former-special-counsel-jack-smith-defends-trump-investigation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/148822\/","title":{"rendered":"‘I will not be intimidated’: Former special counsel Jack Smith defends Trump investigation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Former special counsel Jack Smith on Thursday defended his findings that President Trump \u201cwillfully broke the law\u201d<\/a> in his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, telling lawmakers that Republican efforts to discredit the probe are \u201cfalse and misleading.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cNo one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that [Trump] be held to account. So that is what I did,\u201d Smith said during a frequently heated five-hour hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.<\/p>\n

Smith appeared at the request of Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who accused him of pursuing a politically driven investigation and \u201cmuzzling a candidate for a high office.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was always about politics and to get President Trump, they were willing to do just about anything,\u201d Jordan said. <\/p>\n

Jordan called investigations into the Jan. 6 insurrection \u201cstaged and choreographed,\u201d and said Smith would have \u201cblown a hole in the 1st Amendment\u201d if his charges against Trump had been allowed to proceed. <\/p>\n

Trump has repeatedly called for Smith to face prosecution over the probe, demanding he be disbarred and suggesting that Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi look into his conduct.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe they will do everything in their power to [indict me] because they have been ordered to do so by the president,\u201d Smith said at the hearing. <\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s 2023 investigation found that following Joe Biden\u2019s 2020 victory, Trump led a months-long disinformation campaign to discredit the results, evidenced by audio from a call in which he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to \u201cfind 11,780 votes.\u201d <\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s attempt to sow election discord culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, Smith said. The president directed rioters to halt the certification of the election results, he added. <\/p>\n

In closed-door testimony to the committee last month, Smith said the Department of Justice had built a strong base of evidence of Trump\u2019s criminal schemes to overturn the election.<\/p>\n

A separate case alleged that the president unlawfully kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club after the loss. <\/p>\n

Trump was indicted in the documents case in June 2023, and later for the alleged election conspiracy and fraud claims. Both cases were abandoned after his victory in the 2024 election on the basis of presidential immunity. <\/p>\n

In his opening remarks, Smith reiterated his findings.<\/p>\n

\u201cPresident Trump was charged because the evidence established that he willfully broke the law, the very laws he took an oath to uphold,\u201d he said. \u201cRather than accept his defeat, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Republicans asserted that Justice Department subpoenas of phone records were an abuse of prosecutorial power and constituted surveillance of top government officials. <\/p>\n

Smith replied that obtaining such data was \u201ccommon\u201d in conspiracy investigations and that the records showed call dates and times \u2014 not content \u2014 encompassing the days around Jan. 6, 2021.<\/p>\n

Jordan questioned the special counsel\u2019s judgment in personnel selections, which included Department of Justice investigators who probed the Trump campaign over alleged collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential election. <\/p>\n

\u201cDemocrats have been going after President Trump for 10 years \u2014 a decade \u2014 and we should never forget what they\u2019ve done,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Smith, who has since left the Justice Department to open a private firm with his former deputies, was quick to defend the integrity of his team, adding that Trump has since sought to seek revenge against career prosecutors, FBI agents and support staff for their involvement in the cases.<\/p>\n

\u201cThose dedicated public servants are the best of us,\u201d he said. \u201cMy fear is that we have seen the rule of law function in our country for so long that many of us have come to take it for granted.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hearing routinely devolved into disputes between party adversaries, with Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) lodging scathing accusations against Smith, butting heads with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) over procedure and yielding his time \u201cin disgust\u201d of the witness.<\/p>\n

GOP committee members attempted to poke holes in Smith\u2019s findings about the events of Jan. 6. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) accused Republicans on the committee of trying to \u201crewrite the history\u201d of Jan. 6. <\/p>\n

Midway through the hearing, Trump called Smith a \u201cderanged animal\u201d in a Truth Social post where he once again suggested his Department of Justice investigate the former special counsel.<\/p>\n

\u201cI will not be intimidated,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWe followed the facts and we followed the law. That process resulted in proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed serious crimes. I\u2019m not going to pretend that didn\u2019t happen because he threatened me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hearing came as Trump continues to repeat false claims that he had won in 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a rigged election. Everybody knows that now. And by the way, numbers are coming out that show it even more plainly,\u201d Trump said Tuesday at a White House news briefing.<\/p>\n

In an address to a global audience in Davos, Switzerland, the following day, he said that \u201cpeople will soon be prosecuted for what they did.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Former special counsel Jack Smith on Thursday defended his findings that President Trump \u201cwillfully broke the law\u201d in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[6246,73799,204,10408,73798,7217,4665,719,48,52,51,721,47,50,49,4840,3020,1748,13824,1573,73797],"class_list":["post-148822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-department","tag-document-case","tag-election","tag-finding","tag-five-hour-hearing","tag-jan","tag-jordan","tag-justice","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-law","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-power","tag-president-trump","tag-republicans","tag-result","tag-smith","tag-trump-investigation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}