In a capital where truth has become a fugitive, hunted by power and obscured by procedure, a prosecutor arrived under subpoena on Wednesday to declare he had found it.
Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, in a private Capitol Hill hearing room, told lawmakers his investigation “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump criminally conspired to overturn the 2020 election.
His testimony, delivered not to the public he served but to a Republican-controlled committee that demanded secrecy, was a stark recitation of facts in a city now specializing in fiction.
Smith stated that the basis for his now-abandoned prosecutions “rests entirely with President Trump and his actions.”
He claimed his team also gathered “powerful evidence” that Trump unlawfully retained national security secrets at Mar-a-Lago and obstructed efforts to recover them.
The hearing unfolded behind a closed door that has become a symbol of the era. Smith had volunteered to answer questions in public, an offer the committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), rejected.
Trump, who has publicly called Smith a “thug” and a “sick man,” told reporters he would prefer open testimony, claiming, “There’s no way he can answer the questions.”
The committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, offered a different explanation for the privacy: “Had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men.”
Smith, a career prosecutor, framed his work as relentlessly apolitical.
“I made my decisions in the investigation without regard to President Trump’s political associations, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 election,” he told lawmakers, according to his opening statement. “We took actions based on what the facts and the law required.”
He affirmed that he would make the same decision to prosecute “regardless of whether the president was a Republican or a Democrat.”
This defense comes amid a sweeping campaign of retribution. The Trump administration has moved against officials who investigated him.
An independent watchdog is examining Smith, and the president has issued an order targeting the law firm that provided him with legal services.
Smith’s attorney, Lanny Breuer, said his client was showing “tremendous courage in light of the remarkable and unprecedented retribution campaign.”
Meanwhile, the detailed account of the evidence Smith compiled remains hidden from the American people.
Judiciary Committee Democrats, in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, accuse the Trump administration of a “campaign to bury” the special counsel’s full report, particularly Volume II on the mishandling of classified documents.
They note that the administration has “boasted that President Trump is ‘the most transparent and accessible president in American history,’” while actively suppressing the document.
The hearing also grappled with Republican outrage over investigative tactics, including the subpoena of phone records from several GOP lawmakers around the January 6 Capitol attack.
Smith defended the move as routine and lawful, noting that the records showed only call logs, not contents.
“President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme,” Smith said. “I didn’t choose those Members; President Trump did.”
The two criminal cases Smith led were dropped after Trump’s re-election, citing Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president.
The election subversion case was abandoned following a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity, and the classified documents case was dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge.
The spectacle presents a curious American paradox: a prosecutor forbidden from publicly presenting proof of a presidential crime, while the administration implicated by that proof uses the power of the state to investigate the prosecutor.
The evidence is sealed, the testimony is sealed, and the only loud, clear message comes from the president, who calls the man who gathered the proof a criminal who belongs in prison.
Smith’s closed-door declaration hangs in the air of a closed city—a definitive claim of criminal guilt that may never see the light of a courtroom or the scrutiny of an open congressional hearing.
The republic now waits to see whether the price of knowing what its leaders have done is higher than the cost of remaining ignorant.