Former US special counsel Jack Smith attends a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, September 29, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci
Congressional Republicans were recently fact-checked during a live hearing with former special counsel Jack Smith after they tried to claim he was in Atlanta conspiring with a separate prosecutor investigating President Donald Trump, even though their evidence actually proved he was in Maryland. But despite the GOP's humiliation, Trump's team is continuing its crusade against Smith.
Trump's communications director posted an angry X screed on Monday because he is upset at Smith for wearing an anti-Trump shirt at a rock concert.
"Steven Cheung tore into Jack Smith in an X post after the former special counsel, who previously investigated criminal allegations against the president, was photographed at an anti-Trump concert wearing a 'No Kings' protest T-shirt," reported The Daily Beast's Will Neal on Monday. In his post, Cheung complained that “Jack Smith is a scumbag who was the partisan attack rat for Democrats who weaponized the justice system against President Trump for political purposes. Don’t think they won’t go after innocent Americans again if they get their way.”
Neal reported, "Smith’s T-shirt was from the merch line for anti-Trump rocker Bruce Springsteen’s 'Land of Hope and Dreams' tour, during which Springsteen was often explicitly critical of the second Trump administration."
He continued, "The former special counsel, 57, wore the shirt while attending the 'Power to the People' festival in Maryland, organized by Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello, also a fervent Trump critic."
Despite Republican attempts to deflect from their hearing faux pas, the main story regarding the Smith testimony is the fact that Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) accused Smith of perjuring himself when the attorney said he had not been to Atlanta in February 2024. Schmitt made this claim based on the fact that Smith had attended a basketball game with a team known as the "Hawks," but it turned out he was mixing up the University of Iowa Hawkeyes (who had played in Maryland) with the Atlanta Hawks. It later came out that Schmitt was warned the information, which he received from Trump's Justice Department, had not been vetted, but he went ahead with the line of questioning anyway.
“It would be funny if it weren’t so concerning,” journalist Jonathan Rauch told political analyst Charlie Sykes last week. “It just reminds us that the charges that are being used are totally bogus.” He cited as another example David Hearn, an Olympian wrongly charged with a felony charges when Trump blamed him for his own botching of the Reflecting Pool renovations.. “They fell apart at the touch of reality. They fell apart so badly that a federal judge dismissed the charges with prejudice. That almost never happens. But that means that the judge trusts the Justice Department so little that they’re not even allowed to bring back the charge no matter what they come up with. The judge is saying, we just can’t trust these people. So all these demonstrations of comic incompetence. They have a serious grim side, but it’s kind of a saving grace that the folks running MAGA are not more capable than they are.”
