Jack Smith testifies publicly this morning
Analysis from Donald Trump’s “performance” in Davos on Wednesday will tend to obscure the show starting in the U.S. House at 10 a.m. ET this morning. Don’t let it:
The House Judiciary Committee may be inviting former special counsel Jack Smith to testify Thursday in an attempt to undercut the legitimacy of Smith and his investigation, or in the attempt to catch him in a lie. Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, has framed the hearing as necessary oversight of the longtime prosecutor’s decision to charge President Donald Trump with a multitude of federal crimes in 2023. But whatever House Republicans’ intentions, by inviting Smith’s public testimony, they’re giving him the public platform to make the case that juries never got to hear.
Expect Jordan to be in top bombastic form. He’s performing for an audience of one.
Smith will testify only on Volume I of his report on Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
“A two-day snoozefest” is how MS Now’s Hayes Brown describes former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s 2019 public testimony on his investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s Russia ties. Mueller decided he had no jurisdiction to indict a sitting president. But neither could he “totally exonerate” Trump as the White House spun Mueller’s findings.
Brown continues:
Smith, by contrast, successfully obtained multiple indictments against Trump. As he said in his closed-door deposition before the Judiciary Committee last month, his office “believed that we had proof beyond a reasonable doubt for all the charges and that we would have gotten convictions at trial.” And based on the transcript and video from that deposition, the committee’s Democrats will be more than happy to help Smith lay out the case that Trump successfully managed to delay long enough to get re-elected.
Democrats will have coordinated their questions in advance. Their questions in round after round will elicit answers to spotlight the most damning findings in Smith’s report. They hope to generate the kind of ratings that would make Trump envious.
Republicans led by Jordan will, of course, badger Smith, talk over him, cut him off, impugn his integrity, and as Brown suggests, set thinly disguised perjury traps in their questions. Expect them to refer Smith to the Trump Justice Department for perjury prosecution whatever Smith says today. Dear Leader insists on it. Fox and other right-wing outlets will fume about Smith’s “obvious” lies.
Recall that in Smith’s videotaped interview, he said (NPR):
“The evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy,” Smith said in the deposition, which congressional Republicans released on New Year’s Eve. “These crimes were committed for his benefit.”
Smith said the violent attack at the U.S. Capitol, which injured 140 law enforcement officers, would not have happened, except for Trump.
“No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account,” according to a copy of Smith’s opening statement he intends to deliver to Congress Thursday. “So that is what I did.”
Brown again:
But unlike Mueller, whose stoniness worked against him when Republicans attacked his findings, Smith isn’t making himself an easy target for Jordan and his fellow Republicans. Over the course of the more than eight hours Smith spent testifying, the committee’s Republicans tried to catch Smith slipping on the minutiae of his decision to prosecute Trump, the origins of his appointment as special counsel and the work of his prosecutors. The results were laughable.
Watch Smith’s testimony today and help it spread across social media. We will likely find clickworthy moments worthy of virality. You know the cult and Russian bots will be doing their part.
Brown concludes, “If anything, the MAGA loyalists have given Smith a chance to highlight the yawning gulf between the story they tell about the 2020 election and the truth.” But in the aftermath of Davos, it will be a one-day story without your help. Amplify it.
Trump is still trying to suppress Volume II of Smith’s report, the section on Trump’s theft of secret government documents. Trump in his personal capacity asks the Palm Beach court “for an order prohibiting the release of Volume II of the Final Report prepared by so-called ‘Special Counsel’ Jack Smith and his office.” That would be a request to U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon. She’s been running interference for Trump from the beginning of the documents case.
The 19-page filing also requests that the District Court of the Southern District of Florida “permanently prohibit the release of Volume II,” requesting that “the Department of Justice, as well as its current, former, and future officers, agents, officials, and employees,” should be barred “from (a) releasing, sharing, or transmitting Volume II or any drafts of Volume II outside of the Department of Justice.”
The release of the work would “lead to the public dissemination of sensitive grand jury materials, attorney-client privileged information, and other information derived from protected discovery materials, raising significant statutory, due process, and privacy concerns for President Trump and his former co-defendants,” it adds.
Trump was not this concerned about the exposure of national security secrets, was he?