Jack Smith Delivers a Masterclass in Political Combat

The Former Special Counsel's Precision Strike

In a calculated move to outplay the political noise machine, former Special Counsel Jack Smith has gone on the offensive.

Through a letter penned by his lawyers to Senators Chuck Grassley and Jim Jordan, Smith is systematically dismantling the smear campaign led by Donald Trump’s allies in Congress and the Department of Justice.

This correspondence is not a defense; it is a counterattack executed with prosecutorial precision.

The letter’s brilliance lies in its subtlety. Consider its description of Smith’s investigations into “Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and his role in attempting to overthrow the results of the 2020 election.”

As legal analyst Allison Gill recently pointed out, the word “alleged” is present for the documents case, but it is conspicuously absent when describing the attempt to overturn the election.

This is no accident. It is a deliberate choice of words from the man who built the case, framing one set of actions as accusations to be proven and the other as a matter of historical fact. It is a quiet but devastating jab that sets the tone for the entire letter.

A Masterclass in Exposing Hypocrisy

The letter directly confronts the false claims that Smith “tapped” senators’ phones or “spied” on their communications. With the calm demeanor of a teacher, it explains that his office obtained “toll records,” a routine investigative tool that shows call logs but not the content of the conversations.

Wiretapping, the letter clarifies, is something the Special Counsel’s office “did not do.”

After dispensing with the lie, Smith’s team masterfully exposes his accusers’ flagrant hypocrisy. The letter points out that obtaining toll records is a standard, bipartisan practice.

Special Counsel Robert Hur did it while investigating President Biden, and no one complained. More pointedly, during Trump’s first term, his own DOJ obtained the communications records of Democratic Representatives Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff along with dozens of their staffers, and Republicans were silent.

The final blow is the revelation that Smith’s team provided these very toll records to Trump and his lawyer, Todd Blanche, two years ago during discovery. They never complained, proving the current outrage is nothing more than manufactured political theater.

The “Turducken of Information Hiding”

The letter saves its most amusingly dry rebuttal for the outlandish claims of FBI Director Kash Patel.

Patel publicly asserted that Smith hid the toll record information so that “’no one would find it,’” putting it in a “’lockbox in a vault, and then put that vault in a cyber place where no one can see or search these files.’”

Smith’s response is a masterstroke of professional deadpan. “It is not clear what cyber place in a vault in a lockbox Director Patel is describing,” the letter states, “but Mr. Smith’s use of these records is inconsistent with someone who was trying to conceal them.”

This takedown of what former FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe called the “’turducken of information hiding’” is followed by cold facts. (For those unfamiliar with the term, a turducken is a boneless turkey stuffed with a deboned duck, stuffed with a boneless chicken.)

The letter notes that the use of toll records was mentioned in the indictment and the records themselves were produced in discovery, as previously noted.

The irony is thick, given that Trump’s own team hid the transcript of his call with Ukrainian President Zelensky on a highly classified server to prevent it from being found.

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A Baller Move for a Public Showdown

Smith’s final move is his most audacious. He “respectfully requests the opportunity to testify in open hearings” before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. Unlike Robert Mueller, who was reluctant to testify, Smith is volunteering, challenging his critics to a public showdown.

Smith attaches several clever conditions. He requires “assurance from the Department of Justice that he will not be punished for doing so,” guidance on what he can say about the unreleased Volume Two of his final report on the classified documents case, and access to all of his investigative files.

As Gill noted, this is a “baller move” that puts his opponents in a political trap. They must either deny his request and appear to be hiding the truth, or grant it and give a national platform to the very prosecutor they have tried to discredit, armed with all the facts.

It is a checkmate maneuver in a high stakes political chess game.