When Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee opened an investigation into the Justice Department’s criminal inquiries of Donald Trump, the question wasn’t whether members would hear from former special counsel Jack Smith, but rather, how.
The prosecutor wanted the hearing to be public so that everyone could see and hear his answers. Chairman Jim Jordan refused, preferring secrecy to sunlight.
There was no great mystery as to why. The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago that House Republicans were “reluctant to give [Smith] a prime public platform out of concern that he could embarrass Trump by making a compelling case for the indictments over the president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his retention of classified documents.”
That is, the point of the GOP hearing was to try to trip up the former special counsel, not offer him an opportunity to present compelling evidence and tell inconvenient truths the party prefers to keep from the public.
So although we don’t yet know exactly what the prosecutor said in his closed-door testimony on Wednesday, it quickly became obvious that Jordan’s motivation for secrecy was well grounded. NBC News reported:
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 parts 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 of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Smith told members of the House Judiciary Committee at a closed-door hearing.
Smith added that he and 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.”
After the hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, joked that Jordan “made an excellent decision in not allowing Jack Smith to testify publicly, because had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities of Jan. 6.” Whether a transcript of the testimony ever reaches the public remains to be seen. Watch this space. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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