Jack Smith Defends His Trump Indictments During House Hearing

“Do you swear or affirm, under penalty of perjury, that the testimony you’re about to give is true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information and belief, so help you God?” “I do. No one should be above the law in this country, and the law required that he be held to account. So that is what I did. To have done otherwise on the facts of these cases would have been to shirk my duties as a prosecutor.” “You, like the President’s Men for Richard Nixon, went after your political enemies. Maybe they’re not your political enemies, but they sure as hell were Joe Biden’s political enemies, weren’t they? They were Harris’s political enemies. They were the enemies of the president, and you were their arm, weren’t you?” “No.” “So, Mr. Smith, what evidence did you develop to suggest Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election?” “We had evidence from a variety of sources, evidence from people who were close to Donald Trump and who he relied on, people who wanted him to win the election. Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused Jan. 6, that it was foreseeable to him and that he sought to exploit the violence.” “Under your theory, people besides the president were involved in the unprecedented assault on American democracy, but you didn’t find it necessary to charge them criminally.” “I had not yet charged anyone besides the president.” “You didn’t — you decided not to charge anybody but Donald Trump in that indictment.” “I made the decision to make the charges in this case.” “And, Mr. Smith, do you believe that President Trump’s Department of Justice will find some way to indict you?” “I believe that they will do everything in their power to do that because they’ve been ordered to by the president.”