GOP lawmakers made Smith hearing a 'parody of reality TV': ex-DOJ prosecutor

During a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on Thursday, January 22, former special counsel Jack Smith was questioned by a variety of Democratic and GOP lawmakers — from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), a constitutional lawyer. Some House Republicans tried to paint Smith's two federal cases against Donald Trump — the election interference case and the Mar-a-Lago documents case —

as partisan attacks engineered by former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris, while Raskin zeroed in on the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol Building and the role it played in one of Smith's prosecutions.

In an op-ed published by MS NOW on January 22, Andrew Warren — deputy legal director of Democracy Defenders Action and a former federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) — offers scathing analysis of the way GOP lawmakers performed at the hearing. Instead of asking relevant questions, Warren laments, House Republicans focused on disparaging Smith and defending Trump.

"Former special counsel Jack Smith's public testimony Thursday should have been a sober accounting of the criminal investigations into President Donald Trump and the January 6 Capitol riot," Warren argues. "Instead, the hearing predictably devolved into a scripted parody of reality TV. The session began with a grandstanding opening statement from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, followed by prepared speeches and hostile questions that not only ignored Smith’s prior testimony, but often ignored his presence altogether."

The former DOJ prosecutor elaborates, "For example, Jordan declared that Smith's investigation was 'always about politics' without offering a shred of evidence. Over the course of five hours, Republicans meticulously avoided discussing the substance of what Smith described as Trump's 'criminal scheme' to overturn the 2020 election. Rather than engaging with the evidence, they retreated into well-worn political grievances and attempts to impugn Smith's character."

Warren notes that during the January 22 hearing, Smith "provided candid and detailed answers about the evidence against Trump for obstructing the certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021, and for his mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago" — while House Republicans did everything they could to make the hearing a "circus."

Andrew Warren's full MS NOW op-ed is available at this link.

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