Jack Smith Says Trump Allies Were Willing to Testify Against Him

Political allies of Donald Trump were willing to testify against him in cases brought by the US Justice Department, according to former Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Smith said that fellow Republicans were willing to cooperate with the investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in a 255-page transcript and video deposition that was released Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee.

Jack Smith

Photographer: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

The committee has been investigating probes led by Smith into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021.

Lawmakers from both parties questioned Smith for a full day earlier this month in a closed-door deposition about those investigations, which Trump’s allies have criticized as being part of a sweeping conspiracy against him.

Read More: House Republicans Subpoena Special Counsel Who Probed Trump

Smith secured indictments against Trump, both in the election interference case and the classified documents case. He dropped both cases after Trump was reelected president, citing a Justice Department policy that prohibits the prosecution of sitting presidents.

Trump and his allies blasted Smith’s investigations, often describing them and other actions they disliked as examples of how the Biden administration “weaponized” the government against conservatives.

Smith rejected that line of attack during the deposition, telling lawmakers that he had “numerous” witnesses who would have said they voted for and supported Trump, but believed his actions had broken the law.

“We had an elector in Pennsylvania who is a former Congressman who was going to be an elector for President Trump who said that what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal,” Smith said. “Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party.”

When asked if Trump’s First Amendment rights allowed him to claim that he had won the election, Smith said he was free to make false statements.

“But what he was not free to do was violate federal law and use knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function,” Smith said. “And that differentiates this case from any past history.”

According to the transcript, Smith defended his actions, testifying that he would have brought similar investigations and charges against Democratic presidents.

“It’s important to state clearly the amount of evidence we had and the basis for why we proceeded,” Smith told the committee. “Why we proceeded as we did is because we had a strong case, as I set forth in the final report.”

Smith told the House Judiciary Committee about a Jan. 6, 2021, phone call during the attack on Congress between Trump and Jim Jordan — then the panel’s top Republican and now its chairman overseeing the investigation — in which Jordan made clear the significance of what was happening at the Capitol.

Smith said Mark Meadows, former White House chief of staff, described the call during an interview with the Special Counsel. The call stood out to Meadows, Smith said, because Jordan seemed uncharacteristically scared during the Capitol attack.

“That’s totally ridiculous, as Mr. Jordan was one of the last people off the floor on January 6th, and it’s certainly not what Mr. Meadows was meaning to say,” said Jordan spokesman Russell Dye.

A message left for Meadows at the Conservative Partnership Institute, where he is a senior partner, wasn’t immediately returned.

The release of Smith’s deposition on New Year’s Eve came as the Trump administration confronts multiple challenges domestically and abroad.

With control of both houses of Congress at stake in next year’s midterm elections, polls show that many Americans give the president low marks on the economy.

Questions over Trump’s association with the late financier and convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein continues to distract the White House from its agenda going into 2026.

At the same time, the president’s efforts to end the war in Ukraine have thus far been unsuccessful. And as he prepares for meetings with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the New Year, China’s massive military exercises near Taiwan set off alarm bells in Washington and other capitals.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the deposition Wednesday evening.

Smith, a career federal prosecutor, was appointed as an independent special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022 to take charge of criminal inquiries regarding the conduct of Trump and others in the 2020 election. Before that, Smith had been a special prosecutor in The Hague, looking into investigations of war crimes in Kosovo.

Almost immediately, Trump began accusing Smith and his staff of persecuting him. Even before his return to office, he has said that Smith himself should face prosecution over what he and his supporters claim is misconduct.

--With assistance from Jamie Tarabay, Chris Strohm, Zoe Tillman and Erik Wasson.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Jimmy Jenkins in Washington at jjenkins199@bloomberg.net;
John Harney in Washington at jharney2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net

Peter Blumberg

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