Jack Smith Agrees To Testify About Trump in Bid To Thwart Criminal Charges

Special Counsel Jack Smith will appear under oath before Congress next month in what could be his final forum to make the case that prosecuting him would be futile. Senator Charles Grassley, who chairs the upper chamber’s Judiciary Committee, announced Monday that Mr. Smith had accepted an invitation to testify before that body on September 22. Mr. Smith, who has never invoked the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination, insists that President Trump was guilty of election interference “beyond a reasonable doubt.” He testified before the House Judiciary Committee in January and behind closed doors in a December deposition. Mr. Smith “needs to answer directly to Congress for his actions,” Mr. Grassley, 92, said. The lawmaker added that the special counsel “must be honest and forthcoming in his answers, because the American people deserve nothing less than full transparency and accountability.” Mr. Grassley calls Mr. Smith’s prosecution of Mr. Trump over January 6, 2021, a “deeply flawed, weaponized investigation.”Mr. Smith already faces a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for prosecution on two counts of lying to Congress. That accusation came from the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Congressman Jim Jordan. Mr. Smith’s lawyers contend that the referral reflects a “chilling eagerness to weaponize the justice system by attacking a career, nonpartisan public servant who faithfully and fearlessly performed his duties by following the facts and the law.”The scale of Mr. Smith’s investigation of Mr. Trump for election interference in the wake of the 2020 election, codenamed “Operation Arctic Frost,” has come to light in two stages. Early last year Mr. Grassley disclosed documents showing that Mr. Smith accessed telephone metadata for 14 Republican solons, including 10 senators. Those subpoenas were approved by Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.Last month Mr. Grassley announced that “Arctic Frost” also involved access to the text messages of 44 lawmakers. Mr. Jordan’s theory of prosecution for Mr. Smith turns on the deposition in December. Mr. Smith was asked, “Did you seek a search warrant for the content of any text messages from Members?” He answered, “I don’t recall.” When Mr. Smith was asked if he stopped short of searching texts, he responded, “Correct.”Mr. Jordan declared on Sunday his hope that the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, would not recuse himself from a prospective prosecution of Mr. Smith. Mr. Blanche is undergoing a confirmation gauntlet in the Senate. Mr. Jordan writes in his referral letter to Mr. Blanche — whose Department of Justice is the only body that can bring federal criminal charges — that Mr. Smith “made willfully and intentionally false statements” during his testimony in December.Mr. Jordan’s language hews closely to the statutory requirement for guilt. The law requires not only a statement that is untrue, but also that the untruth was made with an intention to deceive. That is a high bar. One defense against such charges is the claim of “literal truth,” which involves the argument that testimony was true even if it was invasive or incomplete. The burden is on the lawyer to ask the right question, not on the witness to volunteer information.Mr. Smith did not invoke the Fifth Amendment once during his two sessions before lawmakers. On Monday Mr. Smith’s lawyers wrote to Mr. Grassley that their client “looks forward to the opportunity to appear before your Committee in a public hearing to correct the many mischaracterizations of his tenure.”The special counsel — who also prosecuted Mr. Trump for the storage of secret documents at Mar-a-Lago — told Congress in January with respect to Mr. Trump that “No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account. So that is what I did.” He also insisted, “If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”

Jack Smith Agrees To Testify About Trump in Bid To Thwart Criminal Charges

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