Former Particular Counsel Jack Smith arrives to testify throughout a closed-door deposition earlier than the Home Judiciary Committee on December 17, 2025 in Washington, D.C.
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Former particular counsel Jack Smith has been itching to speak about his investigations into President Trump.
He’ll get that likelihood on Thursday on Capitol Hill, with one massive caveat: part of Smith’s report that targeted on the president’s mishandling of categorised supplies stays beneath wraps.
Smith’s look earlier than the Home Judiciary Committee marks the primary open testimony about his work. He presided over two federal legal indictments of Trump. Neither of these instances reached a jury earlier than Trump gained the election and returned to the White Home final yr.
Republican leaders of the panel have portrayed Smith as partisan.
However in a videotaped deposition, Smith stated the president had solely himself accountable, for costs he tried to overturn the desire of voters in 2020.
“The proof right here made clear that President Trump was by a big measure probably the most culpable and most accountable particular person on this conspiracy,” Smith stated within the deposition, which congressional Republicans launched on New 12 months’s Eve. “These crimes had been dedicated for his profit.”
Smith stated the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, which injured 140 regulation enforcement officers, wouldn’t have occurred, aside from Trump.
“Nobody needs to be above the regulation in our nation, and the regulation required that he be held to account,” in keeping with a replica of Smith’s opening assertion he intends to ship to Congress Thursday. “So that’s what I did.”
He is been desperate to defend the work of prosecutors and FBI brokers who labored on the investigations of the president. Most of these folks had been fired after Trump returned to energy.
The president highlighted these personnel strikes as an accomplishment at a information convention this week.
“Ended Joe Biden’s weaponization of our authorities and eliminated his handpicked radical left Marxist prosecutors from the Division of Justice, like deranged Jack Sick Smith,” President Trump stated. “He is a sick son of a bitch.”
Trump has promised at completely different instances to launch a legal investigation into Jack Smith and even throw him overseas.
Smith has stated he has little question the president needs to hunt retribution towards him.
And one space the place he’ll tread rigorously in Congress on Thursday is the investigation into categorised paperwork the FBI present in a ballroom, a rest room, and an workplace at Trump’s Florida resort. A second quantity of Smith’s remaining report that considerations that episode has been blocked from launch by Decide Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who oversaw the case, however media organizations and nonprofit teams have pushed to launch it.
Trump’s private lawyer made a recent plea this week to maintain these findings secret. The president argues Smith’s report comprises grand jury and privileged supplies that might damage Trump’s constitutional and privateness rights whether it is launched.
