Jack Smith Tells Senate Panel His Trump Probes Were Evidence-Driven, Not Political

Former US Special Counsel Jack Smith spent Tuesday defending the investigations he ran into President Donald Trump, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee that his team acted within Justice Department policy and built its cases on evidence rather than political motive. Republican members of the committee, however, used the hearing to accuse him of weaponising prosecutorial power against the right and its donors.

Smith, who served as a war crimes prosecutor at The Hague before being appointed special counsel in 2022, was summoned to testify about the two criminal indictments he brought against Trump in 2023. In his opening remarks, he said the investigation had "developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation" — a formulation notably stronger than the standard applied before a grand jury, which requires only probable cause to return an indictment.

The first indictment Smith authorised alleged that Trump attempted to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. The second concerned his handling of classified documents while out of office. Together they made Trump the first US president ever to face a criminal indictment, a milestone that remains central to the political fight over whether the cases were legitimate accountability or electoral sabotage.

Two additional indictments were pursued by other prosecutors. One in New York accused Trump of falsifying business records to conceal unflattering information about his conduct during the 2016 presidential campaign. A separate case in Georgia concerned allegations that Trump and his allies moved to overturn the 2020 election results. Of the four cases, only the New York indictment reached trial and ended in felony convictions; the others were dropped after Trump won re-election in 2024, consistent with a longstanding Justice Department policy of not prosecuting a sitting president. Smith himself resigned shortly before Trump's second inauguration in January 2025.

Trump has denied all charges against him and has long argued that Smith and former President Joe Biden engineered a political "witch-hunt". That framing shaped the tone of Tuesday's hearing, with Republican senators pressing Smith less on the underlying evidence than on the methods his office used to gather it.

Much of the Republican questioning focused on subpoenas that pulled phone records associated with members of Congress and financial information from Republican donors and organisations. Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley accused Smith's team of using its investigations to "map out and target the entire Republican Party" — a charge that goes to the heart of the legality debate, since selective targeting of one political coalition's records could imply partisan intent even where the underlying evidence is admissible.

Smith rejected that characterisation, arguing that his office had a duty to follow the evidence wherever it led. He specifically defended the seizure of lawmakers' phone records, saying they helped corroborate evidence that Trump and his allies contacted members of Congress in an effort to delay certification of the 2020 election results — conduct that formed the backbone of the federal election-interference cases.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose own records were among those sought, pressed Smith on why members of Congress were not notified of the subpoenas at the time. Smith said prosecutors feared that disclosure could allow Trump and his associates to destroy evidence or otherwise interfere with the investigation, a justification grounded in the need to preserve evidence rather than in concealment of the target's political identity.

"Is it a crime to be a Republican?" Cruz asked. "Absolutely not," Smith replied. The exchange underscored a tension that has never been fully resolved: the subpoenas were issued by prosecutors appointed to investigate the president, but the personal records swept in belonged to elected officials exercising oversight functions, including the committee sitting in the room.

Smith said his office consulted the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section before obtaining the records. He also noted that the information obtained disclosed the timing and duration of calls but not their content — a detail that has become central to the defence argument, since prosecutors can show contact without revealing what was said. Critics have countered that no law prohibited prosecutors from seeking such records during the course of the investigation, meaning the practice was permissible even if politically damaging.

Beyond the procedural sparring, Smith escalated his critique, 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 fired for "doing their jobs", and noted that those firings have generated ongoing litigation. In March, three former FBI agents who investigated Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election filed a class-action lawsuit alleging they were terminated as part of a "retribution campaign". The suit seeks their reinstatement.

Smith, who said Trump has threatened him with jail, 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, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime," he said, adding: "I will not be silenced by continued threats of prosecution from the president or others."

The hearing therefore served two purposes at once: it gave Smith a public platform to testify that the cases against Trump were properly grounded, and it gave Republican senators an opportunity to put the conduct of the investigations on the record. With the criminal cases closed, the most consequential consequences of the probes now run through the courts rather than the Senate — including the former agents' retaliation suit, the legal challenges to the firings of Smith's team, and any renewed congressional oversight of a Justice Department that Smith portrays as politically compromised.