Jack Smith Faces Senate Grilling Over Trump Case, Phone Records

Jack Smith sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee for hours on Tuesday and delivered a message unusual in its bluntness: "I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the president or others." The former special counsel who indicted Donald Trump twice — over the attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago — now finds himself the target of prosecution threats, and the hearing made clear that both parties intend to keep fighting the legal war of the last election straight through this one's midterms.

Smith defended his investigations as apolitical, describing his team as career professionals immune to political pressure. "Anybody who has worked with me and knows me during the course of my career knows that I would not let politics play a role," he told the committee. "And I would just add that if you knew the people I worked with, they would not either."

His sharpest words were reserved for what followed the cases rather than the cases themselves. The Trump administration has fired the prosecutors who worked on the investigations, and Smith, a career federal prosecutor before his appointment as special counsel by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, said the terminations had stripped the government of crucial expertise and made the country less safe. "That has never happened in my career," he said. "I have never seen anything remotely like it in any Republican or Democratic administration."

Both of his prosecutions were abandoned after Trump's 2024 victory, citing long-standing Justice Department opinions that a sitting president cannot be federally indicted. The cases were never tried. On Tuesday, the argument over them moved entirely into the political arena.

## The Phone Records Fight at the Center

The procedural flashpoint of the hearing was Smith's use of subpoenas to obtain toll records for Republican members of Congress who were in contact with Trump or his aides on January 6, 2021. Smith told senators the records were ordinary investigative steps, approved by the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, and provided corroborating evidence for what he described as the core of the conspiracy: exploiting the riot to delay the certification of Joe Biden's win.

"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," Smith testified. "It was an important part of our investigation."

Three facts frame the dispute. Toll records reveal only the date, time and duration of calls — not their content. There is no legal prohibition on obtaining the toll records of members of Congress. And the first Trump administration's own Justice Department sought the records of Democratic lawmakers during an investigation, a precedent Democrats pointedly raised on Tuesday.

None of that has stopped the issue from becoming a rallying point. Representative Jim Jordan, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, referred Smith to the Justice Department in July for potential prosecution over his testimony about the records collection — a referral Smith and his attorneys have vigorously disputed. "I stand by my testimony before the House of Representatives," Smith said on Tuesday.

## A Hearing That Was Also a Spectacle

The legal clash arrived wrapped in some of the least dignified hearing theater in recent memory. Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri called Smith a "total dirtbag" and accused him of perjury over a basketball game that appears to have been a case of mistaken teams: Smith had attended an Iowa Hawkeyes women's basketball game against the University of Maryland, not, as Schmitt suggested, an Atlanta Hawks game in Georgia at the height of the Fani Willis controversy. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, pressing Smith on whether the Biden White House had directed his prosecutions, demanded to know whether Smith believed in the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny, then informed him: "You make me want to throw up in my mouth."

Chairman Chuck Grassley framed the stakes the way Republicans would prefer them framed: "The Smith election case ultimately wasn't just about Trump," the Iowa senator said. "It was about partisan agents and prosecutors mapping out the Republican apparatus."

What the spectacle obscured was the absence of new evidence. Smith told Kennedy the decision to prosecute was his own and that he had "no idea" whether the White House had instructed the department. Democrats used their questioning to draw out the legal basis of the indictments and to decry the firings. The hearing's real function was positional: Republicans building a public record to justify prosecuting the prosecutor, Democrats building a record that prosecuting prosecutors is precisely how the rule of law breaks.

## What This Means For You

**If you have followed the January 6 story:** the criminal cases are gone, but the fight over their meaning is escalating. Testimony, referrals and subpoenas are now the record, and Tuesday's hearing was a chapter in a historical account that is being contested in real time.

**If you care about prosecutorial independence:** the next test is what the Justice Department does with the Jordan referral. If career prosecutors can face investigation for charging decisions made in good faith, the shield that keeps enforcement of the law from depending on the party in power gets thinner with every administration, of either party.

**If you vote in the midterms five weeks away:** congressional oversight is on the ballot. Committee majorities decide who gets subpoenaed, who testifies and what gets investigated — and whether the next Jack Smith hearing, if there is one, looks anything like this one.