Jack Smith Defends Trump Prosecutions in House Deposition

Even adversaries of Jack Smith, the former special counsel, conceded that his tight-lipped, painstaking approach made tripping him up particularly difficult.

House Republicans grilled Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice indicted Donald J. Trump, in a closed-door deposition on Wednesday that began with Mr. Smith’s blistering declaration that Mr. Trump’s actions — and not political bias — prompted the prosecutions.

The stakes for Mr. Smith, a former anticorruption and war crimes prosecutor, were high. Republicans, acting on Mr. Trump’s demand to pursue those who pursued him, pelted Mr. Smith with detailed questions in hopes of catching him in a misstep that would justify a prosecution by the Justice Department, according to lawmakers in both parties.

The civil and exhaustive eight-hour session did not seem to yield any obvious avenues for legal action against Mr. Smith, or even many moments of drama, according to people who were in the room at one time or another.

Mr. Smith, they said, answered questions cautiously and professionally but quickly made it clear he intended to take the fight to Mr. Trump and his supporters.

“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether the president was a Republican or Democrat,” Mr. Smith said in his opening remarks, according to excerpts provided to The New York Times.

Mr. Smith said that his team of investigators had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Mr. Trump had tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He also told House Judiciary Committee lawmakers and staff members that he had “developed powerful evidence that showed President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January 2021” and that Mr. Trump “repeatedly tried to obstruct justice.”

Mr. Smith was appointed in late 2022 to oversee the investigations, already begun by the department, into Mr. Trump’s retention of classified materials in Florida and his push to overturn the election results in Washington. He dropped both cases after Mr. Trump was elected to a second term, citing court rulings that prevented prosecution of sitting presidents.

The committee has already referred one of Mr. Smith’s top deputies, Thomas Windom, to the Justice Department for not fully answering similar questions. Mr. Windom, now Mr. Smith’s law partner, has denied those allegations.

While Democrats expressed confidence that Mr. Smith had escaped the Wednesday session unscathed, Republican aides cautioned against drawing too many conclusions until they had reviewed the transcript of the interview.

Mr. Smith requested that his appearance before the committee take place in public, and picked up an unlikely ally in that cause: Mr. Trump himself. But Republicans opted to keep his deposition private out of concern that Mr. Smith would use a hearing as an opportunity to make the case against Mr. Trump that two courts had denied him.

Wednesday’s session opened with a barrage of questions about Mr. Smith’s decision to subpoena the metadata phone records of Republican senators as part of his investigation of a White House effort to marshal support for reversing Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s lawful election, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

Mr. Smith held his own, according to Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, who said Mr. Smith “schooled” his questioners.

Time and again, Mr. Smith contested claims by committee Republicans that he and his team had overstepped the bounds of impartial investigation, cataloging the publicly released evidence he had collected that pointed to Mr. Trump’s guilt.

During one pointed exchange with the committee’s Republican chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, Mr. Smith accused the president of committing “affinity” fraud — a scheme to hoodwink his own supporters into violating the law because they felt a special kinship with him, according to a Democrat who witnessed the discussion.

Mr. Jordan later said that he “learned some interesting things,” but refused to address reporters’ questions about the content of the deposition. He repeated his accusation that Mr. Smith’s decision to indict Mr. Trump was “political.”

Republicans have accused Mr. Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in November 2022, of conducting a politically motivated witch hunt against Mr. Trump.

In the hours before the deposition, the Justice Department and F.B.I. turned over to Congress selective internal communications from the summer of 2022 showing that some F.B.I. agents expressed concerns about conducting a search of Mar-a-Lago, the president’s resort and residence in Florida.

Trump allies and administration officials promoted that report as a “bombshell” — proof that the Biden Justice Department had raided Mar-a-Lago without first gathering evidence of wrongdoing.

In fact, the initial internal debate over the search was already previously known. Senior F.B.I. officials eventually agreed that the search was justified because of video showing Trump associates moving around boxes believed to contain classified materials.

The search, which was approved by a magistrate judge, uncovered a substantial trove of sensitive government documents stored in places accessible to the public, including a bathroom.

Mr. Smith’s testimony came in the middle of an ongoing court battle over whether to release the portion of his prosecutorial work that still remains under seal: a report detailing the investigation into Mr. Trump’s mishandling of highly sensitive classified documents.

That report could contain undisclosed and embarrassing details about how Mr. Trump took the documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, then obstructed efforts by the Justice Department to retrieve them.

Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee who handled the documents case, has sat on requests to release Mr. Smith’s report for months. But a federal appeals court, concerned by her delays, recently ordered her to make a decision about the volume by early January.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump filed court papers asking Judge Cannon not to release the report, saying that doing so would only “perpetuate Jack Smith’s unlawful criminal investigations and proceedings.”

The daylong session on Wednesday began with a stone-faced Mr. Smith walking silently past a phalanx of reporters, and later past a bellowing protester who had to be restrained from following Mr. Smith and his lawyers into the bathroom during a break in the questioning.

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