WASHINGTON — Former special counsel Jack Smith told a congressional committee Wednesday that his team found “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump engaged in a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to portions of his opening statement obtained by NBC News.
Trump also “repeatedly tried to obstruct justice” to keep secret his retention of classified documents found during an FBI search in Mar-a-Lago, Smith told members of the House Judiciary Committee during a closed-door hearing.
Smith said his team turned up “powerful evidence that showed Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in Jan. 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.”
House Oversight Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, subpoenaed Smith to testify as part of Republican efforts to investigate the special counsel’s office. Smith’s investigations led to two indictments against Trump: in the classified documents case and the 2020 election interference case. Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents case in July 2024 and a separate judge agreed to drop the 2020 case in November 2024 after Trump won re-election.
Trump has repeatedly called for Smith to be prosecuted.
Facing a renewed wave of Republican attacks on his investigations into Trump, Smith was expected to attempt to use the hearing to correct what his team has described as mischaracterizations about the special counsel investigation.
Smith had wanted to testify in a public setting, but House Republicans refused to accommodate Smith’s request.
Lanny Breuer, Smith’s attorney, told reporters Wednesday that his client “is showing tremendous courage in light of the remarkable and unprecedented retribution campaign against him by this administration and this White House.”
Pushing back at criticism over his team’s decision to obtain and analyze the phone call records of nine congressional Republicans, Smith told members of the committee that those records “were lawfully subpoenaed and were relevant to complete a comprehensive” investigation.
“January 6 was an attack on the structure of our democracy in which over 100 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to assaulting police officers that day,” Smith said. “Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election.”
“I didn’t choose those Members,” Smith added, “President Trump did.”
Smith’s report on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election found that Trump “inspired his supporters to commit acts of physical violence” on Jan. 6, and that Trump knowingly spread “demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false” claims about the election as part of the effort.
Smith is not expected to testify about Volume II of his report, which focused on Trump’s handling of classified documents.
After Trump’s team moved to block its release, Cannon banned the release of that report, as well as the sharing of “any information or conclusions in Volume II” with anyone outside the Justice Department. In a legal filing this month, a lawyer representing Trump wrote that “Volume II of Jack Smith’s Final Report should not be made public.”
The Trump administration fired career prosecutors who worked on Smith’s team early in the year, and more recently fired FBI special agents and even support staff linked to Smith. Trump has called Smith “a criminal” who should be “investigated and put in prison.”
Smith said during his testimony Wednesday that while he’s responsible for making the decisions to charge Trump in both the election subversion and classified documents cases, the basis for those charges “rests entirely with President Trump and his actions, as alleged in the indictments returned by grand juries in two different districts.”
Smith recounted how he was taught as a young prosecutor to follow the facts and the law “without fear or favor” and to do “the right thing, the right way, for the right reasons,” principles he said guided his career.
“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,” Smith said.