Jack Smith defends handling of Trump probes at heated Senate hearing

Grassley delivered closing remarks about Smith's investigations into Mr. Trump and said his own probe showed the cases were infected with "defects, failures and political motives."

"His own words and that of his staff have told the tale of rampant wrongdoing and political conduct," he said.

Grassley said his investigation will continue.

When asked by GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina if he wishes he did anything differently during his time as special counsel, Smith said that his limited public statements allowed others to misrepresent his investigations without a public rebuttal.

Smith said he began his career operating under the presumption that "you only do your talking in the courtroom, and that you don't talk on the courthouse steps." But, he added, "if you stick to that and that alone, people can unfairly malign your team, and unfairly malign you and your case in a way, and you really can't respond."

"You don't want to interfere with someone's right to a fair trial, and you don't want to get down in the gutter and start calling people names. But at the same time, there are things being put out daily that are patently untrue, and you know they're untrue," Smith said.

"I'm not advocating that prosecutors in the future start going on the internet every day responding to comments, but I do think that the school of prosecution I came from, where you only speak in the courtroom — I do agree that prosecutors in the future need to learn to be able to communicate to the outside world, because I believe strongly we did our investigation the right way, but I limited myself in who I talked to about that," Smith said, pointing to the two short announcements he did in his time as special counsel.

Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, questioned Smith about nondisclosure orders issued by a court that prevented phone carriers from disclosing that they had received subpoenas for toll records from senators' phones.

When asked why he sought the nondisclosure orders, Smith said his team had "strong reason to believe that Donald Trump would destroy evidence."

"We do not have to wait for someone to be injured for an investigation to be obstructed," he said. "We had strong reason to believe that Donald Trump would obstruct our investigation, given the obstruction alleged in the Florida indictment, given the attempts to intimidate witnesses in the election case, given the threats that were later made to witnesses in the election case."

Prosecutors alleged in the indictment in the classified documents case that the president attempted to obstruct the FBI and grand jury probe and hide documents. They said the president directed an aide, Walt Nauta, to move boxes of records to hide them from a lawyer and the FBI, and suggested his lawyer should hide or destroy documents sought by a grand jury subpoena.

Smith's team also said in court papers that the president attempted to delete security camera footage at Mar-a-Lago to hide information from the FBI.

In the elections case, Smith wrote in his final report that Mr. Trump made threatening public statements targeting likely witnesses and resorted to intimidation.

"Disclosure of that subpoena could result in Donald Trump attempting to intimidate witnesses as he had before and after," the former special counsel said.

Smith said his office sought to follow Justice Department policy and federal law when pursuing the nondisclosure orders.

"We submitted these nondisclosure orders consistent with the law and department policy," he said.

When asked whether he had any regrets about his work as special counsel, Smith said he did.

"I regret that the people I worked with have been unfairly fired and vilified," he said.

Sen. Darline Graham, who replaced her brother Sen. Lindsey Graham in the Senate after his death, alleged that Smith accused him of potentially attempting to destroy evidence, intimidate witnesses or cause harm to his investigation. Smith pushed back, saying that Lindsey Graham "likely" would have been a witness if the 2020 election case had gone to trial.

Lindsey Graham, a four-term senator who was seeking reelection, died suddenly in July, and Darline Graham, his younger sister, was appointed to the seat. She won a special primary in August to replace him on the ballot in November.

"I believe your brother was a patriotic public servant. He was not a target of our investigation, and in fact, he likely would have been a witness in our case," Smith said. "Your brother investigated the claims that Donald Trump was making. He found them to be false."

Last year, GOP senators said that the FBI analyzed phone records of more than half a dozen Republican lawmakers, including Lindsey Graham, during Smith's investigation. Smith has repeatedly said Tuesday that he only got toll records showing the duration of the senators phone calls and who they were talking to, and not the contents of the calls themselves.

Darline Graham responded that she believes Smith was "just trying to bully my brother and other allies of President Trump."

"You caused my brother and a lot of other senators a lot of stress, and that makes me sick," Graham continued. "You should be ashamed of yourself. It's also a damn shame that you weaponized our legal system to do this. To go after a political opponent and his allies, including Lindsey, what a disgrace to our justice system and the Constitution that you would stoop this low. Shame on you!"

Smith was pressed by Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, about whether he attended a NBA game between the Atlanta Hawks and Golden State Warriors in Atlanta in early February 2024.

Schmitt said Smith's alleged attendance at the game would be significant because the game occurred around the time that Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis revealed she had a romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, whom she hired as a special prosecutor to work on an investigation into alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

Smith said he did not attend that game, but may have flown through Atlanta on the way to Florida. Still, he told senators he "definitely did not go" to an Atlanta Hawks game.

The former special counsel also said he never met Wade or Willis while he was special counsel.

Schmitt then displayed a poster board with text messages from members of Smith's team, including one asking if "109 Row 1" was reserved for Smith. Schmitt said the messages showed Smith was in Atlanta and attended the NBA game on Feb. 3, 2024.

"I don't think you know that we have this stuff, so I'll give you a second to process it so you don't, you know, perjure yourself," Schmitt told Smith.

But the poster board on display was quickly taken down by Schmitt's staff and Smith asked to see it again.

Schmitt said he would put the information "in a follow-up."

"I think you've already perjured yourself," the senator said, calling Smith a "total dirtbag."

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, continued to push for a copy of the text messages referenced by Schmitt and said Smith should be given the opportunity to see them.

When the poster with the texts was displayed again, Smith said he did attend a women's college basketball game in early February 2024 between the University of Maryland Terrapins and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes to see Hawkeyes star Caitlin Clark play.

That game took place in College Park, Maryland. Klobuchar suggested that Schmitt was mistaking the Hawkeyes for the Atlanta Hawks.

"For a U.S. senator to have false information and imply, based on a confusion about the name of a team, which I knew, knowing my Midwestern sports, and imply that you were in another city, that you were somehow involved that day in what was happening in Georgia, and then call you a dirtbag is something that deserves an apology," Klobuchar said.

Smith told Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, that if his election case had gone to trial, the strongest witnesses would have been Republicans.

"I personally find it very hard to understand how our investigation can be viewed as partisan when the strongest witnesses, the people who were the difference between the rule of law standing and not in our case, were Republicans," he said.

Smith specifically cited Rusty Bowers, the former speaker of the Arizona House, who resisted a scheme to replace a slate of presidential electors who supported Biden with a fake slate that backed Mr. Trump. Biden won Arizona in 2020.

The former special counsel also cited former Vice President Mike Pence, who refused to go along with a plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election by rejecting the electoral votes of battleground states that Biden won.

Pence testified before a grand jury as part of Smith's probe.

Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, questioned Smith about his wife's views on Mr. Trump and what he said were favorable comments she has made about former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama.

Smith noted that he worked in the Trump administration as acting U.S. attorney in Tennessee and then as a war crimes prosecutor at The Hague.

"I'm not going to talk about my family here today," he said. "I'm here to talk about my work as special counsel."

Smith reiterated that he took the job as special counsel because of his career as a nonpartisan prosecutor.

"I knew that I would do it independently, and I would conduct it the same way whether I were a Republican or a Democrat," he said.

Smith said he told then-Attorney General Merrick Garland twice that he was going to prosecute Mr. Trump. The former special counsel brought two criminal cases against the president.

After asking Smith about the toll records from senators' phones that he received, Kennedy told Smith, "you make me want to throw up in my mouth."

Durbin pressed Smith on last year's revelation that investigators looking into Mr. Trump's actions after the 2020 election obtained several Republican lawmakers' phone records.

Smith said that obtaining the records was crucial to his investigation, specifically to prove the criminal intent of Mr. Trump and his unindicted co-conspirators in the 2020 election case.

"They show who a call was to, who a call was from and the length of that call," Smith said, adding that his team consulted with the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section to make sure his subpoenas of the records were appropriate.

"Those records corroborated evidence that we had that the president, President Donald Trump, and his co-conspirators were seeking to exploit the violence on Jan. 6 in furtherance of their criminal scheme," Smith said. "They were taking the fact that law enforcement officers had been brutally assaulted at this institution and using that to seek to delay the proceedings further in violation of the law. It was an important part of our investigation."

Durbin then pressed Smith on whether or not his team "initiate[d] any wiretaps relative to members of Congress of either party."

"No. The records that we're talking about are non-content records," Smith said, adding that it was "unclear" how many phones were being used to make the calls and that there were "incomplete" records from the White House switchboard, necessitating the need for the subpoenas.

Smith said that in the course of his investigation, his team obtained financial information but could not recite each subpoena his office issued.

"I can tell you why we issued subpoenas, and it was to conduct a criminal investigation of one of the most serious crimes that's ever happened in our nation's history. I had a duty to collect facts," he said.

Grassley had asked Smith whether his team of investigators obtained donor data, including financial information. The senator said that his own investigation found that Smith obtained more than 4,700 donor checks, many of which he said was for small dollar amounts.

Grassley said the Justice Department and FBI will now "forever" possess the addresses, phone numbers, bank account information and signatures for "thousands" of people.

As part of his investigation into Mr. Trump's alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Smith examined the president's Jan. 6, 2021, speech at the Ellipse outside the White House. After the president's remarks, members of the rally crowd descended on the U.S. Capitol and breached the building, where lawmakers had gathered to reaffirm the results of the 2020 election.

The rally outside the White House was planned by Mr. Trump's political supporters.

Smith said in his report that the president repeatedly told his supporters that the 2020 election had been stolen and was rigged against him.

In response to a question from Grassley that suggested Smith's team abused their authority, Smith defended the work of his investigative team and criticized the Justice Department's mass purge of his former colleagues after his departure.

"The members of my team that you just mentioned, I'm extremely proud to have worked with them, and the fact that they have been targeted illegally, lost their jobs illegally, and had their lives turned upside down by this Department of Justice is an outrage," Smith said.

According to CBS News reporting since Smith departed the Justice Department after Mr. Trump won re-election, dozens of investigators and career law enforcement at the Justice Department and FBI have been fired simply for working with Smith.

Smith was sworn in by Grassley and delivered his own opening statement.

The former special counsel rejected claims that he is a partisan and said he has served Republicans and Democrats over the course of his career.

"I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalty," he said. "My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded. I believe that there is no role for politics in the proper administration of justice."

Smith said prosecutors must base their decisions on the facts and the law, and a subject's "status, power, prominence, or political affiliation" should not come into play.

The special counsel defended his decision to seek indictments of Mr. Trump and said it was made without regard to his candidacy in the 2024 election.

"Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation," he said. "If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat."

Smith lamented the actions taken by the Trump administration, saying that the rule of law "faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime." He specifically highlighted threats of criminal prosecution against people Mr. Trump's perceived enemies.

"Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department's long-standing core values and traditions," he said. "History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It's often weakened by attacks on the institutions and the public servants sworn to uphold it."

In his opening remarks, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, defended Smith's investigations, and criticized his Republican colleagues for "baseless conspiracy theories" about the former special counsel.

"House Republicans called Mr. Smith to testify in January, but Senate Republicans refused his offer to testify. Instead, they held eight hearings on his supposed wrongdoing, never calling him directly," Durbin said, adding that the witnesses the committee called earlier this year are "MAGA loyalist witnesses with no firsthand knowledge" of the probes.

"In both his theft and distribution of these classified documents, and his attempts to steal the 2020 election, President Trump demonstrated a wanton disdain for the laws of the United States, the will of the people, and our national security," Durbin said, adding that Smith and his team of investigators, most of whom have been fired, or resigned from the Justice Department, had the "necessary experience to tackle this assignment."

Durbin accused Republicans of trying to "contort themselves to support President Trump's lies" around the cases, and said document releases in recent months from Sen. Grassley are attempting to "muddle the professional nature of Mr. Smith's efforts in a manufactured controversy."

Grassley said that as a result of the special counsel's investigation into Mr. Trump's actions related to the 2020 presidential election, the Justice Department and the FBI have "reams" of "very personal information" on "thousands" of Republicans and are unlikely to delete that material.

"In the end, Mr. Smith indicted one person," he said. "That one person was President Trump, but in the process, [he] successfully mapped out the Republican apparatus."

Grassley said that was left out of Smith's final report.

The Iowa Republican said in his opening statement that Smith obtained communications from members of the media.

He listed a number of news outlets, including CBS News, CNN, Fox News, the Associated Press, The Federalist, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Washington Post and the Washington Times.

"Now, what will partisan media say about this disgraceful government overreach?" Grassley said. "I want to hear their response, and I will if they are responsible media."

The Judiciary chairman indicated that the communications were swept up in hundreds of subpoenas targeting GOP groups and individuals, as well as dozens of phones belonging to White House staffers.

Grassley first revealed last year that Smith obtained communications from media companies.

In an opening statement, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, detailed some of the findings from his investigation into Smith's probes, centering on actions taken by Justice Department lawyers involving members of Congress.

Grassley said Smith's election case "ultimately wasn't just about Trump. It was about partisan agents and prosecutors mapping out the Republican apparatus."

The Iowa Republican read from communications the Judiciary Committee obtained about investigations that began before Smith's appointment as special counsel in November 2022, but said the foundation for his probe into the events surrounding the 2020 election was "built by partisan agents and prosecutors."

"Jack Smith took partisanship to a new level," Grassley said, highlighting the toll records from lawmakers' phones that the special counsel received.

Smith is expected to defend his work on the dual Trump investigations, according to a copy of his opening remarks obtained by CBS News.