House Republicans Subpoena Jack Smith Over Prosecutions of Trump

WASHINGTON — House Judiciary Committee Republicans on Wednesday subpoenaed Jack Smith, the special counsel who prosecuted President Donald Trump, for a closed-door interview this month, but lawmakers were swiftly blindsided by Trump’s fiery demand that Smith face a public grilling.

“I’d rather see him testify publicly,” Trump told reporters at the White House after attacking Smith as a “thug” and “a sick man.”

In doing so, Trump, who has called for Smith’s imprisonment, upended the best-laid plans of Republican lawmakers to confront Smith and deny the disciplined former special counsel a televised platform to present his rationale for charging the president for trying to overturn the 2020 election and retain classified documents.

A few hours earlier, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the chair of the committee, told the special counsel that “the committee believes that you possess information that is vital to its oversight of this matter” and demanded he testify on Dec. 17 at 10 a.m. The letter came more than a month after the committee requested Smith’s voluntary testimony.

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Trump’s rejection of that approach places him on the same side as the man he detests as much any other person he has targeted for retribution.

Smith had asked to testify in public. In a statement issued after Jordan sent the letter, Peter Koski, Smith’s lawyer, said in a statement that his client was disappointed that the committee was denying the American people the chance to hear from him directly. He added that Smith looked forward to answering lawmakers’ questions.

People close to Smith have said they are concerned the committee is less interested in fact-finding than luring him into making a mistake or misstatement sufficient to justify prosecution, which Trump has volubly demanded.

On Nov. 19, the committee referred Thomas Windom, a veteran prosecutor who led the investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, for criminal prosecution after he declined to answer some of their questions in a closed-door interview. It is not clear if the department has acted on that referral.

Smith, who spent more than two years aggressively collecting evidence to show that Trump put national security secrets at risk and tried to overturn the 2020 election, appears eager to publicly challenge a foundational pillar of Trump’s most fervent supporters: that the president did nothing to deserve prosecution.

Smith has told people in his orbit that he welcomes the opportunity to present the public case against Trump denied to him by the Supreme Court decision asserting broad presidential immunity from prosecution as well as adverse rulings from a Trump-appointed judge in Florida.

“Deranged Jack Smith is a criminal!!!” Trump said on social media in October after House Republicans released documents showing that the special counsel’s office examined communications between Trump and 160 Republicans as part of the inquiry into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

He has placed Smith at the top of his prosecutorial hit list, along with the attorney general under the Biden administration, Merrick Garland, and his top deputy, Lisa Monaco.

The president, in the same post in late October, demanded they all be “investigated and put in prison.”

While Trump has expressed an eagerness to exact revenge, he has also appeared wary of airing the evidence uncovered by Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor and longtime Justice Department official.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration re-upped its argument to block the release of evidence Smith collected during his investigation of Trump’s hoarding of classified materials at his resort in Florida.