WASHINGTON — 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.

“It was always about politics,” said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the committee’s Republican chairman.

“Maybe for them,” retorted Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, referring to Republicans. “But, for us, it’s all about the rule of law.”

The hearing was on the mind of Trump himself as he traveled back from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with the president posting on his Truth Social account that “Deranged Jack Smith should be prosecuted for his actions” and asserting without any evidence that the prosecutor had committed perjury.

Smith told lawmakers that he stood behind his decisions as special counsel to bring charges against Trump in separate cases that accused the Republican of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden and hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, after he left the White House.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” Smith 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.”

Republicans and Smith spar over phone records

Republicans from the outset sought to portray Smith as an overly aggressive, hard-charging prosecutor who had to be “reined in” by higher-ups and the courts as he investigated Trump. They seized on revelations that the Smith team had subpoenaed the phone records of a group of Republican lawmakers.