Washington — Lawyers for former special counsel Jack Smith reiterated their call for Smith to appear publicly before lawmakers to answer questions about his investigations into President Trump after he testified privately earlier in the week.Smith appeared before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday for a closed-door deposition and answered questions for roughly nine hours, his lawyers, Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski, said in a letter to the panel’s chairman, Jim Jordan, that was obtained by CBS News.”Mr. Smith welcomed this opportunity and hopes that it will serve to correct the many mischaracterizations about the work of the Special Counsel’s Office,” they wrote in the letter, dated Thursday.Breuer and Koski urged Jordan, an Ohio Republican, to promptly release the full videotape of the deposition and said “doing so will ensure that the American people can hear the facts directly from Mr. Smith, rather than through second-hand accounts.” Koski and Breuer also reiterated their request for Smith to address lawmakers in an “open and public hearing.””During the investigation of President Trump, Mr. Smith steadfastly followed Justice Department policies, observed all legal requirements, and took actions based on the facts and the law. He stands by his decisions,” they wrote to Jordan.Politico first reported the letter from Smith’s lawyers to Jordan. Two former special counsels, Robert Mueller and Robert Hur, have each testified in open forums about their respective investigations. Mueller examined Russian interference in the 2016 election, and Hur probed former President Joe Biden’s handling of sensitive government documents.Smith was tapped as special counsel during the Biden administration to take over the Justice Department’s investigations into Mr. Trump’s alleged mishandling of sensitive government documents and his alleged efforts to subvert the transfer of power after the 2020 election. Mr. Trump faced a total of more than 40 charges in both of those cases, though they ended after he won a second term in the White House.Now, with Republicans in control of Congress, they have begun investigating the prosecutions. Smith had offered in October to voluntarily answer questions in an open hearing before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, but Jordan issued a subpoena to the former special counsel demanding Smith’s testimony at a closed-door deposition.In his opening statement to lawmakers, which was obtained by CBS News, Smith defended the prosecutions of Mr. TRump and said he made decisions “without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election.”He said his investigation into Mr. Trump’s alleged efforts to hold onto power after the 2020 election developed “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that the president engaged in a scheme to overturn the results of the last presidential contest. As to the case involving the president’s handling of documents marked classified, Smith told lawmakers that his investigation “developed powerful evidence that showed President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.”Smith also defended investigative steps taken by his team, which included obtaining phone records of nine sitting GOP members of Congress as part of his probe related to the 2020 election. The data was for several days during the week of Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters breached the U.S. Capitol building in an effort to keep Congress from certifying the election results.The former special counsel said the records were “lawfully subpoenaed” and relevant to his investigation.”January 6 was an attack on the structure of our democracy in which over 100 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to assaulting police officers that day,” Smith told the Judiciary Committee. “Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election. I didn’t choose those Members; President Trump did.”On his first day back in the White House, the president issued sweeping pardons to roughly 1,500 defendants who had been convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack.
