By Isabella González
Capital News Service
WASHINGTON– Republican senators this week grilled Jack Smith, the former Department of Justice special counsel who charged President Donald Trump after his first administration.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Smith was asked about the process his team followed to investigate Trump between 2022 and 2023.
After an investigation, Smith charged Trump with mishandling classified documents at his home in Florida and with a criminal conspiracy to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election.
On Tuesday, he was accused of using the Department of Justice to interfere politically. Republican senators criticized Smith’s team for subpoenaing Republican groups and Republican Congress members while investigating the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“I personally find it very hard to understand how our investigation can be viewed as partisan when the strongest witnesses, the people who were the difference between rule of law standing and not, in our case, were Republicans,” Smith said.
“Those records corroborated evidence that we had that President Donald Trump and his co-conspirators were seeking to exploit the violence on January 6th and further into their criminal scheme,” Smith said when he was asked about the subpoenas.
For more than four hours, Republican senators attacked the former official, appointed as special counsel during former President Joe Biden’s administration.
“You may think you are a hero in the story, but let me tell you something, you’re the villain,” U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., said. “You will go down as a total dirtbag.”
On the other side of the room, Democrats defended Smith and his investigations, focusing on the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
“We are now persecuting the prosecutors who followed the evidence,” U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said. “And they are trying to say this is partisanship.”
