Former special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two federal indictments against Donald Trump, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 29, 2026, while the Justice Department Trump controls investigates him. “I stand by my testimony before the House of Representatives,” he said. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the president or others.” In his opening statement: “I myself have been threatened with jail by the president of the United States.”
The threats are on the record. After Smith's House testimony in January, Trump posted, “Based on his testimony today, there is no question that Deranged Jack Smith should be prosecuted for his actions,” and, “At a minimum, he committed large scale perjury!” CNN noted that nearly a year ago Trump appeared alongside then-Attorney General Pam Bondi and claimed Smith had committed crimes, and later wrote, “Hopefully the Attorney General is looking at what he's done.” In July, House Republicans referred Smith to the Justice Department for allegedly lying to them, and Attorney General Todd Blanche testified that the department was investigating the referral. Smith's lawyers call the referral's claims spurious.
Smith defended the cases he brought: “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation.” He said, “If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.” Of his former team, many of them fired, he said: “The fact that they have been targeted illegally, lost their jobs illegally, and had their lives turned upside down by this Department of Justice is an outrage.” Trump has said he did nothing wrong, and the cases ended after he won the 2024 election.
Republicans on the committee attacked Smith's tactics, including his subpoenas of their phone records. Sen. Eric Schmitt accused him of perjury over his attendance at an “Atlanta Hawks” game; Smith had attended an Iowa Hawkeyes women's basketball game. Schmitt told him, “You will go down as a total dirtbag.”
Update (September 30, 2026): more of the testimony bears directly on Trump. Smith's prepared remarks warned that “Individuals are threatened with criminal investigation because they are perceived to have opposed the President,” and he told the committee, “History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It's often weakened by attacks on the institutions and the public servants sworn to uphold it.” Defending the toll-record subpoenas Republicans attacked, he said, “Those records corroborated evidence that we had that the president, President Donald Trump, and his co-conspirators were seeking to exploit the violence on Jan. 6 in furtherance of their criminal scheme.” He said his team had “strong reason to believe that Donald Trump would destroy evidence.” Of his fired colleagues: “who were simply fired because they worked on the wrong case — that has never happened in my career.” To Sen. Darline Graham Nordone, sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham: “Your brother investigated the claims that Donald Trump was making. He found them to be false.” Trump has called Smith “deranged,” a “thug” and a “sleazebag” and has said he should be prosecuted, CBS reported.
Update (October 2, 2026): The texts Schmitt relied on came from the Justice Department, and they did not say what he claimed. The Hill reviewed the special counsel staff messages and found they never named the Hawks or the Hawkeyes; Schmitt's spokesperson said he “has never seen texts referencing Caitlin Clark, hence why he asked what game Jack Smith was at.” MS NOW, citing three sources, reported that the department had shared the material with Republican Judiciary Committee staff before the hearing, and that “Trump appointees have engaged in a highly unusual practice of sharing a broad swath of sensitive material” from the special counsel's investigation as Republicans look for evidence of misconduct. MS NOW also reported, from a single unnamed source, that committee staff had warned Schmitt's team the texts were unvetted, and that the seat number in them did not exist in the Hawks' arena.