Smith defends his Trump investigations at a House hearing. ‘No one should be above the law,’ he says

By ERIC TUCKER, MARY CLARE JALONICK, LISA MASCARO and ALANNA DURKIN RICHER, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith defended his investigations of President Donald Trump at a congressional hearing Thursday in which he insisted that he had acted without regard to politics and had no second thoughts about the criminal charges he brought.

“No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account. So that is what I did,” Smith said of Trump.

Smith testified behind closed doors last month but returned to the House Judiciary Committee for a public hearing that provided the prosecutor with a forum to address Congress and the country more generally about the breadth of evidence he collected during investigations that shadowed Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign and resulted in indictments. The hourslong hearing immediately split along partisan lines as Republican lawmakers sought to undermine the former Justice Department official while Democrats tried to elicit damaging testimony about Trump’s conduct and accused their GOP counterparts of attempting to rewrite history.