Lawfare wrote an entire article about how crazy it was for the Republicans to release the video and the transcript of Jack Smith’s closed door testimony.
Okay, it was released on 12/31/25, but do they seriously think that this is so unimportant that we would forget about Jack Smith and his testimony by the morning of Jan 1?
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is set to testify publicly next week about his investigations into President Donald Trump that resulted in two indictments.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a Fox News Channel interview on Monday night that Smith would appear before the panel on Jan. 22, and a spokesman for Smith on Tuesday confirmed the committee hearing.
“He’ll be a tough witness, but we’re going to present the facts, and I think, frankly, we’re going to show that Jack Smith was part of this bigger effort” to bring down Trump, Jordan said.
Smith has already testified behind closed doors before the committee. A transcript released of that private deposition shows that Smith told lawmakers last month that the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol “does not happen” without Trump, and he vigorously pushed back at the suggestion that his investigations were meant to prevent Trump from reclaiming the presidency in 2024.
“So in terms of why we would pursue a case against him, I entirely disagree with any characterization that our work was in any way meant to hamper him in the presidential election,” Smith said, according to the transcript.
My take? The Republican leadership must be delusional.
Here’s what Ben Wittes had to say.
House Republicans had, after all, declined to allow Smith to testify in public. Yet here was video of the marathon testimony less than two weeks after it had taken place. What was the point of insisting on a private deposition if only to make the whole thing public days later?
Perhaps, I reasoned on sitting down to listen to all eight hours of it, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan thinks he landed major blows on Smith and wants the public to see Smith grilling.
Apparently not. I have seldom seen, heard, or read better prepared testimony by anyone—on any subject.
Smith’s Republican interrogators didn’t land a glove on him. Smith was polite, firm, and factual. I emerged from the deposition genuinely unsure what service Jordan thinks he is doing himself and his cause by releasing it to the public.
The deposition format, as opposed to a hearing, actually favored Smith. Dispensing with the normal five-minute rule of House hearings—under which members give speeches and struggle to put together coherent lines of questioning—each side had one hour of questioning at a time to engage in lengthy colloquies with Smith. Republicans used a shocking amount of that time to whine about Smith’s acquisition of telephone toll records of members of Congress. They used much of the rest to pick nits about picayune aspects of the circumstances of Smith’s appointment, his lack of respect for Trump’s busy schedule in requesting hearing dates, his refusal to allow Trump to review classified discovery in the comfort of Mar-a-Lago, and even the supposed allergy of big law firms to representing Trump or hiring Republican legislative staff.
Smith, meanwhile, gamely defended both the substance and the procedural aspects of his investigation and his prosecutions of the president. It was a quiet rout. And who exactly races to release video of his own ass kicking? And why?
Ben Wittes suggests a few possible answers to his own questions. I’ll summarize those with these bullet points.
- The first is that Jordan doesn’t know he was routed.
- Another possibility is that Jordan knows he was bested. Maybe it’s a lance the boil situation.
- A third possibility is that the Republicans were just doing Trump’s bidding—harassing Smith—and that there’s really no strategy underlying any of it at all other than a long-shot effort to get Smith to make an unforced error.
- Still another possibility is that there is no Republican humiliation at this confrontation because the Republican media ecosystem just lies about what happened. So maybe it doesn’t matter what actually happened.
Wittes ends with this:
Smith wrote two volumes of his final report. But only one of them is public—the one dealing with the Jan. 6 prosecution. The classified documents half of the report is under seal, and Smith can’t talk about any of it because of an injunction from Judge Aileen Cannon. That care on his part drove both sides a bit crazy in the first deposition—and clearly bothered Smith as well. But the injunction has a shelf life that may be coming to an end.
So after blocking Jack Smith’s report on classified documents, Cannon has (mostly, kinda, sorta) agreed to lift her order on Feb. 24. But, as she usually does with Trump, she suggests a way that Senile Satan and his disgusting legal team could challenge that and delay the release yet again.
Do any of our legal peeps know if that is being pursued?
Ultimately there was no cake for us last year because of Cannon’s delay, delay, delay. But it will be interesting to see if Jack Smith’s public testimony has legs.
Hope springs eternal.
In a Bizarre Move by the Republicans, Jack Smith Will Testify PUBLICLY TomorrowPost + Comments (60)
