After a fiery, five-hour-long hearing with former special counsel Jack Smith on Thursday, Republicans and Democrats both emerged claiming victory.
But notably, only one party seemed to want to run the hearing back.
“I’m thrilled and frankly stunned House Republicans called Jack Smith to testify,” Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., told MS NOW, “because Jack Smith is reminding the American people of the criminal that Donald Trump is.”
That was a common refrain from Democrats on Thursday.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., argued that Smith “handled himself very well.” Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., praised the hearing for “reminding people that this could happen again.” And Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., told reporters that Republicans “must be regretting their decision” to have Smith testify.
“He’s making his case,” Lofgren said.
As Republicans tried to argue that former President Joe Biden and former Attorney General Merrick Garland improperly pressured Smith to bring charges against President Donald Trump — an accusation that Smith forcefully and repeatedly denied — Trump was applying pressure on his own attorney general to bring charges against Smith.
During the hearing, the president wrote on Truth Social that “Hopefully” Attorney General Pam Bondi “is looking at what he’s done.” After the hearing wrapped, Trump said there was “no question that Deranged Jack Smith should be prosecuted for his actions.”
“At a minimum, he committed large scale perjury!” Trump wrote in a second post.
Smith, for his part, was clear-eyed about the stakes of his testimony. Asked by Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., if he believes the Justice Department would find some way to indict him, Smith said he thought Trump’s DOJ would “do everything in their power” to prosecute him.
“Because they’ve been ordered to by the president,” Smith said.
After the hearing, Balint argued Trump’s Truth Social post only further made her case. “It’s just astonishing that you have Republicans who continue to defend this man when, in real time, he is doing exactly the thing that we are saying he’s been doing,” Balint said.
Still, Republicans suggested they punctured holes in Smith’s record during Thursday’s hearing, painting him as a partisan operator who pursued — as Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., put it — “maximum litigation advantage at every turn.”
Kiley told MS NOW he was “surprised” Smith said there wasn’t anything he would have done differently or that he didn’t make any mistakes. “I mean, you know, in the course of a very long investigation, surely there’s something that you might have done differently,” Kiley said.
Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, said the American people would now see Smith “for who really is.”
“Because I think we tore him apart today,” Nehls said.
“We exposed a rat today,” he added.
The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, seemed to focus his questioning on two items: Cassidy Hutchinson and a $20,000 payment to a confidential informant.
Hutchinson, the former Trump White House staffer who became a bombshell witness during the Jan. 6 Committee hearings, was a former congressional staffer Jordan knew well. But he seemed to think that, if he could undermine her second-hand testimony about Trump trying to take control of a steering wheel and drive up to Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, then he could undermine the entire case against the president.
Smith made it clear that Hutchinson’s testimony played little, if any, role in his decision to prosecute Trump — and might not play any role in a trial.
And Jordan’s questioning about the $20,000 payment didn’t break much new ground. Smith testified that he approved a payment from the FBI to a “confidential human source who was reviewing video and photographic evidence” from Jan. 6.
“But who’s the source?” Jordan asked.
“I do not know the identity of the source,” Smith said.
After the hearing, Jordan said the hearing went “very well.”
“I think everyone sees how political this whole thing was,” Jordan told MS NOW.
Of course, despite both parties seeming to think they got what they needed out of the hearing, only one party actually won in the zero-sum game of convincing voters. And it was hard to ignore, based on their questioning, what Republicans thought counted as a victory.
At one point, Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, used his five minutes to question when Smith had been sworn in as special counsel, and whether the process was proper.
“It strikes me as odd that Attorney General Garland had you retake the oath of office on the 14th of September of the following year. Why did he make you do that?” Gooden asked.
“Uh, as I sit here right now, I do not recall,” Smith said.
Even though some GOP questions didn’t seem to go much of anywhere, the hearing wasn’t exactly the cable news event that Democrats had hoped for.
Smith never got to argue his case in court because the cases were squashed when Trump was re-elected. Democrats hoped Smith might litigate the case — at least, in part — during his testimony Thursday.
Instead, Smith was reserved and laconic, answering questions in a matter-of-fact manner that didn’t do much to convince the American public that Trump was guilty of crimes like conspiracy to defraud the United States or conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
What he lacked in lawyerly sizzle, however, he made up for in prosecutorial seriousness. For many Democrats, it seemed frustrating that he would not more directly engage with their entreaties to make his case against Trump.
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., told MS NOW “it would be helpful” if there had been more revelations on the substance of the accusations against Trump, but she noted the constraints of the hearing.
“It’s not a great format when you only have five minutes,” she said, noting she had “about three times the material” that she was able to address during her time.
At one point, Swalwell assured Smith that he had “nothing to be ashamed of.”
“You did everything right, sir,” Swalwell said.
But Smith’s nonpartisan tone only underscored the gravity with which he argued he undertook in this investigation. And Smith was clear that his investigation concluded that Trump caused Jan. 6 more than any other person — that Trump “sought to exploit the violence,” in Smith’s words.
Notably, Smith was limited by what he could testify about during the hearing. A Trump-appointed federal judge, Aileen Cannon, has blocked the release of Smith’s final report on a major part of the case Smith tried to bring against Trump — a restriction that may be lifted in a matter of weeks. (Trump’s team has asked for the judge to “permanently” block the release of a report on Smith’s case.)
Scanlon told MS NOW the final report on the documents case could be even “more damning” for Trump than Smith’s testimony.
“Maybe not to the overall country, but in terms of Donald Trump’s fingerprints being all over the effort to obstruct the U.S. government in reclaiming the top secret documents that he stole and took to Mar-a-Lago,” she said.
While Thursday’s hearing unfolded more than five years after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, reminders of the Capitol riot were frequent.
Officers Aquilino Gonell, Michael Fanone, Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges — who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 — sat in the front row of the hearing room for the entirety of Smith’s testimony. At one point, as Nehls was speaking, Fanone coughed: “F*** yourself.”
Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers who was convicted of seditious conspiracy following the Capitol riot — and then pardoned by Trump — also dropped into the hearing room for nearly an hour.
Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, who was in the House chamber during the riot, listened to part of the hearing alongside the officers.
Of course, one of the clearest signs that Democrats think they got more out of the hearing than Republicans came at the very end. Raskin made it clear that Democrats intend to bring Smith back for another open hearing if, as expected, the order from Judge Cannon that prohibits Smith from discussing the Mar-a-Lago documents case is lifted.
“You’re gonna call him back again?” Jordan asked Raskin, after the two went back and forth over the minority’s right to call its own witness.
“Yes,” Raskin responded.
“Wow. OK,” Jordan said. “We’ll see, we’ll see.”
Jack Fitzpatrick and Syedah Asghar contributed to this report.
Kevin Frey is a congressional reporter for MS NOW.
Mychael Schnell is a reporter for MS NOW.