House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan calls on Jack Smith to testify over Trump investigations
The House Judiciary Committee wants former special counsel Jack Smith to testify before the panel behind closed doors about his investigations into President Donald Trump.
Committee Chairman Jim Jordan on Tuesday requested an interview by Oct. 28 and is demanding documents and communications as well.
"As the Committee continues its oversight, your testimony is necessary to understand the full extent to which the Biden-Harris Justice Department weaponized federal law enforcement," Jordan wrote in the letter to Smith.
Jordan accused Smith of conducting "politically motivated investigations," referring to the FBI's release of a letter showing Smith obtained phone toll records of several GOP lawmakers.
Earlier this month, the FBI released information that showed Smith's investigators at one point sought limited phone toll records of several Republican senators around the time of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
As part of his investigation, Smith extensively investigated Trump and his allies' pressure campaign on lawmakers to block the certification of former President Joe Biden's election win -- including calls that were made to senators after the Capitol was breached by the pro-Trump mob.
There's no indication that Republican senators were a target of Smith's investigation, and the toll records sought by investigators would not include any information about the content of conversations they may have had.
Both Smith and former Attorney General Merrick Garland repeatedly maintained prior to departing office that none of the actions taken in either the classified documents investigation or the probe of Trump's efforts to subvert his 2020 election loss were driven by politics.
Both cases were dropped following Trump's reelection in November due to a longstanding Justice Department policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president.
Smith last week defended his work as special counsel and said that the prosecutors he worked with have the highest levels of integrity.
"Those people I brought in were all former longtime former federal prosecutors who had worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations over and over again," Smith said last Wednesday at a talk at University College London. "These are team players who don't want anything but to do good in the world. They're not interested in politics."
Trump pleaded not guilty in 2023 to 40 criminal counts related to his handling of classified materials after leaving the White House, and later that year pleaded not guilty to separate charges of allegedly undertaking a "criminal scheme" to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Trump denied all wrongdoing in both cases.
Smith last week said that, unlike the classified documents case against then-President Joe Biden, Trump showed the "willfulness" to possess classified documents.
"We had tons of evidence of willfulness. We had and the obstructive evidence, publicly saying 'These are my documents' or things like that and 'I can keep them' -- the evidence to not give the documents back when the government even tried to get them back before there was a criminal investigation."
The former special prosecutor, in his most extensive on-camera remarks since he resigned following Trump's reelection, slammed the idea that politics would have played any part in his investigations.
"The idea that politics would play a role in big cases like this, it's absolutely ludicrous and it's totally contrary to my experience as a prosecutor," he said.
He offered a dire assessment about the current state of the Justice Department, which last month indicted former FBI Director James Comey just days after Trump issued a public demand for his DOJ to act "now" to bring prosecutions against Comey and other political foes.
"Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on," Smith said. "Process shouldn't be a political issue, right? Like if there's rules in the department about how to bring a case, follow those rules. You can't say, 'I want this outcome, let me throw the rules out.'"
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, sarcastically lauded Jordan for seeking all records related to Smith's probes, which Raskin said would necessarily include Smith's final report on his classified documents investigation, which Trump's Justice Department has kept from being made public.
"In a completely unexpected and welcome twist, Chairman Jordan's letter today to Jack Smith clearly demands the release of Smith's full report, and all accompanying records, from his investigation into Donald Trump's hoarding of classified documents and obstruction of justice at Mar-a-Lago," Raskin said in a statement. "An extraordinary years-long MAGA cover-up has deprived the American public of the opportunity to read this special counsel report that the taxpayers paid for. But Chairman Jordan, in demanding 'all documents you sent ... during your service as Special Counsel relating to your work, your investigation, your charging decisions...' has finally taken a comprehensive stand for complete transparency and accountability. Congratulations.
"Of course, everyone can see the irony today in Judiciary Republicans demanding that Jack Smith come testify about so-called 'politically motivated prosecutions' just days after Trump's handpicked Acting U.S. Attorney indicted yet another one of the President's widely-proclaimed political targets," Raskin said regarding the indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James last week.
Alexander Mallin, Luke Barr and Katherine Faulders contributed to this report.
