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Former Special Counsel Jack Smith spent four hours testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday about his investigations into President Trump’s election interference and theft of national security information.
Republicans mostly used their time to shout at the witness while affecting to clutch their pearls over his supposed attack on the rule of law. Sen. Darline Graham crying “Shame!” over her dead brother with all the affect of a Southern-fried catfish was a highlight.
But the purpose of this exercise was more than mugging for the cameras. Senate Republicans hoped to discredit Smith’s prosecutions of Trump and foster a narrative that he weaponized the Justice Department at the behest of the Biden White House. And they hoped to catch him out in some way that could be fashioned into the perjury indictment Trump has publicly demanded over and over and over.
These two objectives stand in ironic tension, particularly with Attorney General Todd Blanche leading an unabashed campaign of retribution against Trump’s enemies and publicly insisting that the president has every right to direct DOJ investigations. And Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s embarrassing f*ckup didn’t help the cause either.
Third verse, dumb as the first
The template here isn’t new.
In 2018, Republicans seized on texts between FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page as proof that the entire Mueller investigation was a plot to take out Trump. There was no evidence that they’d done anything inappropriate, other than use their work devices to conduct an extramarital affair. And indeed the Justice Department's inspector general concluded that the investigation was properly predicated, while two separate prosecutors handpicked by Bill Barr to find wrongdoing came up essentially empty.
Nevertheless, Rep. Louie Gohmert sneered during a hearing that Strzok was obviously lying, since he was such a skilled prevaricator the he “could probably pass a polygraph.”
