Former special counsel Jack Smith was still contemplating whether to charge President Trump’s co-conspirators in the Jan. 6, 2021, case when the president won the election, he revealed to the House in a closed-door deposition released Wednesday.
Smith also told investigators he was preparing to rely on a number of Trump allies who agreed to testify against the president that “what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal.” He also said the violence of Jan. 6 was “foreseeable” to Trump.More...
“Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party,” Smith told the panel’s team over the course of a more than seven-hour interview on Dec. 17.
The Justice Department prohibited Smith from talking about not-yet-public information related to his investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. He was also more broadly prohibited from speaking about aspects of either case against Trump still covered by grand jury secrecy rules.
But the 255-page transcript offers new insights into Smith’s approach to the case, a rare window into the mind of a prosecutor prohibited from making bombshell statements about the case and who has been little heard from since a brief press conference in 2022 announcing he would oversee the investigations.
Smith told investigators that he met with many of Trump’s allies in the case — saying he found a level of cooperation with some of the six co-conspirators they accused of working alongside the president to block the peaceful transfer of power.
“Some of the co-conspirators met with us in proffers and did interviews with us,” Smith said.