Jack Smith to defend Trump investigations to House Republicans

Former special counsel Jack Smith has been itching to talk about his investigations into President Trump.

He’ll get that chance on Thursday on Capitol Hill, with one big caveat: a part of Smith’s report that focused on the president’s mishandling of classified materials remains under wraps.

Smith’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee marks the first open testimony about his work. He presided over two federal criminal indictments of Trump. Neither of those cases reached a jury before Trump won the election and returned to the White House last year.

Republican leaders of the panel have portrayed Smith as partisan.

But in a videotaped deposition, Smith said the president had only himself to blame, for charges he tried to overturn the will of voters in 2020.

“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.”

He’s been eager to defend the work of prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the investigations of the president. Most of those people were fired after Trump returned to power.

The president highlighted those personnel moves as an accomplishment at a news conference this week.

“Ended Joe Biden’s weaponization of our government and removed his handpicked radical left Marxist prosecutors from the Department of Justice, like deranged Jack Sick Smith,” President Trump said. “He’s a sick son of a bitch.”

Trump has promised at different times to launch a criminal investigation into Jack Smith or even throw him out of the country.

Smith has said he has no doubt the president wants to seek retribution against him.

And one area where he’ll tread carefully in Congress on Thursday is the investigation into classified documents the FBI found in a ballroom, a bathroom, and an office at Trump’s Florida resort. A second volume of Smith’s final report that concerns that episode has been blocked from release by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who oversaw the case, but media organizations and nonprofit groups have pushed to release it.

Trump’s personal lawyer made a fresh plea this week to keep those findings secret. The president argues Smith’s report contains grand jury and privileged materials that would hurt Trump’s constitutional and privacy rights if it is released.