Smith defends his Trump investigations at a House hearing. 'No one
should be above the law,' he says
[January 23, 2026]
By ERIC TUCKER, MARY CLARE JALONICK, LISA MASCARO and
ALANNA DURKIN RICHER
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith
defended his investigations of President Donald Trump at a congressional
hearing Thursday in which he insisted that he had acted without regard
to politics and had no second thoughts about the criminal charges he
brought.
“No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required
that he be held to account. So that is what I did,” Smith said of Trump.
Smith testified behind closed doors last month but returned to the House
Judiciary Committee for a public hearing that provided the prosecutor
with a forum to address Congress and the country more generally about
the breadth of evidence he collected during investigations that shadowed
Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign and resulted in indictments.
The hourslong hearing immediately split along partisan lines as
Republican lawmakers sought to undermine the former Justice Department
official while Democrats tried to elicit damaging testimony about
Trump's conduct and accused their GOP counterparts of attempting to
rewrite history.
“It was always about politics,” said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the
committee's Republican chairman.
“Maybe for them,” retorted Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, referring to
Republicans. “But, for us, it’s all about the rule of law.”
The hearing was on the mind of Trump himself as he traveled back from
the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with the president
posting on his Truth Social account that “Deranged Jack Smith should be
prosecuted for his actions” and asserting without any evidence that the
prosecutor had committed perjury.
Smith told lawmakers that he stood behind his decisions as special
counsel to bring charges against Trump in separate cases that accused
the Republican of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election
after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden and hoarding classified documents at
his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, after he left the White
House.
“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that
President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” Smith said. “If asked
whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I
would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a
Democrat.”
Republicans and Smith spar over phone records
Republicans from the outset sought to portray Smith as an overly
aggressive, hard-charging prosecutor who had to be “reined in” by
higher-ups and the courts as he investigated Trump. They seized on
revelations that the Smith team had subpoenaed the phone records of a
group of Republican lawmakers.
The records revealed the incoming and outgoing phone numbers as well as
the duration of the calls but not the content of the communications, but
Rep. Brandon Gill, a Texas Republican, said the episode showed how Smith
had “walked all over the Constitution.”
Smith has repeatedly justified the move as necessary to document any
contact that Trump or surrogates may have had with lawmakers on Jan. 6,
2021 —the day Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol — as he beseeched
them to halt the certification of the election results.
“My office didn’t spy on anyone,” Smith said, explaining that collecting
phone records is a common prosecutorial tactic and was essential in this
instance to help prosecutors understand the scope of the conspiracy.
Smith describes a wide-ranging conspiracy on 2020
Under questioning, Smith described what he said was a wide-ranging
conspiracy to overturn the results of the election and recounted how the
Republican refused to listen to advisers who told him that the contest
had in fact not been stolen. After he was charged, Smith said, Trump
tried to silence and intimidate potential witnesses against him.
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Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith testifies
before the House Judiciary Committee at the Capitol in Washington,
Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Smith said one reason he felt confident in the strength of the case
that prosecutors had prepared to take to trial was the extent to
which it relied on Republican supporters of Trump.
“Some of the most powerful witnesses were witnesses who, in fact,
were fellow Republicans who had voted for Donald Trump, who had
campaigned for him and who wanted him to win the election,” Smith
said.
Smith was appointed in 2022 by Biden’s Justice Department to oversee
investigations into Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing. Both
investigations produced indictments against Trump, but the cases
were abandoned by Smith and his team after Trump won back the White
House because of longstanding Justice Department legal opinions that
say sitting presidents cannot be indicted.
The hearing unfolded against the backdrop of an ongoing Trump
administration retribution campaign targeting the investigators who
scrutinized the Republican president and amid mounting alarm that
the Justice Department's institutional independence is eroding under
the sway of the president.
In a nod to those concerns, Smith said, “My belief is that if we do
not hold the most powerful people in our society to the same
standards — the rule of law — it can be catastrophic because, if
they don't have to follow the law, it's very easy for people to
understand why they don't have to follow the law."
Rep. Becca Balint, a Vermont Democrat, also asked Smith at one point
if he was concerned the Trump administration would try to prosecute
him.
Smith responded: “I believe they will do everything in their power
to do that because they’ve been ordered to by the president.”
GOP says Smith wanted to wreck Trump's White House bid
Republicans, for their part, repeatedly denounced Smith, with Rep.
Kevin Kiley of California accusing him of seeking “maximum
litigation advantage at every turn” and “circumventing
constitutional limitations to the point that you had to be reined in
again and again throughout the process.”
Another Republican lawmaker, Rep. Ben Cline of Virginia, challenged
Smith on his team's requested court order to restrict Trump from
making incendiary comments about prosecutors, potential witnesses
and other people involved in the case. Smith said the order was
necessary because of Trump's efforts to intimidate witnesses, but
Cline asserted that it was meant to silence Trump in the heat of the
presidential campaign.
And Jordan, the committee chairman, advanced a frequent Trump
talking point that the investigation was driven by a desire to
derail Trump's candidacy.
“We should never forget what took place, what they did to the guy
we, the people, elected twice,” Jordan said.
Smith vigorously rejected those suggestions and said the evidence
placed Trump’s actions squarely at the heart of a criminal
conspiracy to undo the 2020 election.
“Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who
caused Jan. 6, it was foreseeable to him and that he sought to
exploit the violence," he said.
___
Associated Press writer Joey Cappelletti in Washington contributed
to this report.
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