Was this the most embarrassing Senate hearing ever?

0:02This is a global production. In closing, I just want to say, in the famous words of the chief of the secret police under Stalin of show me the man, I'll show you the crime. You may think you're a hero in this story, but let me tell you something. You're the villain. You've done so much damage. As a former prosecutor, I can say there's so much damage the trust and faith people have in our system. You have weaponized the Department of Justice against political enemies to an extent that has never happened in the history of this country. You will go down as a total dirtbag. That is a Republican senator calling a former special counsel a dirtbag.

0:43His crime was to have investigated Donald Trump over the storing of top secret classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after he became president. Why are Republicans still so furious with this bogeyman? Welcome to the News Agents USA. The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. It's John. It's Miles. And the hearing where we heard Senator Eric Schmidt from Missouri call Jack Smith a dirtbag was only the kind of tip of the iceberg of an extraordinary hearing. If we're just to kind of spool back a few years, Jack Smith was appointed as the special counsel to investigate Donald Trump's activities around what happened after he was president, the storage of these top secret files that were at Mar-a-Lago in a toilet, which he would bring out to show guests, to impress them about this or that.

1:48And there was going to be a prosecution of Donald Trump for this. He had been indicted. And then, of course, a presidential election comes in. The Supreme Court had ruled earlier that it couldn't really go ahead in the form that it was. And of course, Donald Trump wins and it all goes away. And that's why a lot of people framed the 2024 election as being a choice between the White House or the jailhouse for Donald Trump. And of course, he got the White House instead. And it means that the person who was the prosecutor, whose job it was to amass evidence, not to torment Donald Trump, but to find if there was a breach of the law, which on a lot of people's judgment there was.

2:30And Jack Smith is now public enemy number one when it comes to Republicans and the MAGA base because he dared to go after Donald Trump. What's extraordinary about it, John, is that Jack Smith went up and testified not only on his own volition, but he actually asked to come up and testify. Now, if you remember during the start of Trump's second administration, he was going after law firms that had opposed him. He was going after entire institutions of American society. He was going after individual critics, myself included. And during much of that time in the first year, we didn't hear from Jack Smith, this guy who was enemy number one for Donald Trump, the guy who was trying to prosecute him.

3:17Smith laid pretty low, and then after some time, Smith sort of comes out of his hibernation and once again starts defending the prosecution of Donald Trump that had been dropped before Trump came back into office. And he writes to Congress and says, I want to come up and testify. You all are talking about how this was a sham prosecution. I want to tell you otherwise. I am willing to raise my right hand and swear under oath, under penalty of perjury, that everything I had been investigating was done sort of legitimately and by the law. And, John, Republicans didn't quite know what to make of that.

4:00And for a period of time, they didn't have Jack Smith come up and testify. He did ultimately go and testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee on the House side. But Republicans in the Senate have sort of been putting off having him do so on the Senate side, I think, for fear that Jack Smith's case might be more compelling than their case. And viewers of the hearing yesterday can be the judge of that. Yeah, well, let us take you to the hearing because it needs a bit of setting up. because this Missouri senator thought he had got an absolute gotcha on Jack Smith that he had met with a woman called Fannie Willis, who was, I think, also involved in the prosecution in the Georgia case, which is where Donald Trump rings up Brad Raffensperger and says, I need another 11 ,780 votes.

4:52And if you find those for me, I will have won the Georgia race as well. and I will become the president. And that kind of, there was a whole prosecution that was going to go on about that. And this guy, Schmidt, thinks he has found a link between the two of them where a conspiratorial meeting took place at a basketball game. Except Schmidt has got his facts all wrong and he's made a total arse of himself, as you will hear in this quite extended clip. So your testimony today is that you did not go to a Hawks game on February 3rd, 2024. Is that correct? I have no recollection of that. Okay. Is it your testimony that you were not in Atlanta on February 3rd, 2024?

5:44Let me just give you a little context. The day before Fannie Willis came clean with her affair with the prosecutor, you know, the Atlanta prosecutor that was also trying to get Trump, The next day, were you in Atlanta? I do not believe so. What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior Hawks game on February 3rd, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?

6:14I don't think you know that we have this stuff. So I'll give you a second to process it so you don't perjure yourself. You just took it down really quick if I could look at that again Can the witness be allowed to comment now that he can see the chart? I think I can address it if this is the correct basketball game I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time And the Marshal Service was there with me You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa I think February of 2024 before but again that's you can check that out if that's what we're talking about that might be the confusion over the names of the team but perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully on whose questioning is this by the most term you are you are you using your time center is this what this is now we just are we just having like an open session questions I just well I'm glad you're trying to rehabilitate the witness but it's not you are calling a witness a dirt I presented him with text messages about him wanting to meet with people that could have obviously been related to the prosecution that was coordinated with his office in Atlanta.

7:24John, it was really an extraordinary exchange. As you could hear there, the confusion ended up being this. Senator Eric Schmidt's team assumed that Hawks meant that Jack Smith, the prosecutor, was down in Atlanta at an Atlanta Hawks game. As he clarified that day, He had been at a different game in Maryland where the basketball team was playing the Iowa Hawkeyes. Totally different state, totally different team, totally different context. And Eric Schmidt gets caught in this lie trying to do a gotcha. But here's the other thing that's remarkable about this. Eric Schmidt's office had evidently prepared conservative influencers for this sort of slam dunk gotcha moment because just as he was delivering this sort of spiel, a number of conservative influencers, including Benny Johnson, posted about it, sort of had these prescripted posts about this allegedly damning evidence that they put on Twitter and on social media.

8:31And when it became clear that Schmidt and his team had made a mistake, these posts very, very quickly came down. But it shows you that there had been this behind-the-scenes coordination between Republicans to try to paint Jack Smith as a liar in the lead-up to and during this hearing. Yeah. And what we played you there was a kind of edited version of what actually took place in the hearing, because you hear Schmidt saying you've perjured yourself, you've committed perjury. And Jack Smith had done no such thing. Eric Schmidt had quite simply got his facts wrong, carried on and maintained that he was a dirtbag and then wouldn't apologise for the fact that he had made these utterly false and baseless accusations about Jack Smith.

9:23And I kind of came away at the end of it, Miles, thinking, God, what does it take for a senator to have the decency? And these senators are treated like demigods at times. What does it take for one of them to say, OK, you know what? I got it wrong. I apologize for that. I maintain I think that Jack Smith got things wrong, but I was wrong about that. Not a bit of it. Well, in Donald Trump's Washington, that's basically the new rule of politics is you don't apologize ever. And it's why Republicans call Donald Trump behind the scenes Teflon Don because nothing sticks to them. And it was remarkable to a lot of Republicans who saw him rise 10 years ago.

10:03I remember working in the House of Representatives during the Trump campaign in 2016, and Republican leaders like John Boehner and House Speaker Paul Ryan were just sort of mesmerized by how Donald Trump was able to just have these scandals wash over him and not attach to him. And it's because he refused to apologize about anything. And you see that now become almost a common feature among politicians in Washington. Eric Schmidt has still not apologized for that. Senator A.B. Klobuchar, who you heard in that clip, urged him to apologize, urged him again to do that. And he didn't. What's important to note about this, though, John, is that that senator you heard, Eric Schmidt of Missouri, is being considered as a possible vice presidential contender, a running mate if J.D.

10:53Vance runs for the presidency in 2028. So this was kind of supposed to be his big moment on the stage. And again, that clearly is why conservative influencers had been prepared to promote the moment, had been prepared to elevate Eric Schmidt kind of out of the obscurity of the Senate and more into the mainstream. And that big bombshell debut ended up being a bombshell in a different direction. Yeah. And, you know, he's blown himself up, it would seem, with it. But I suppose my other question, Ars, is why the obsession to go back and rake over all of this again and again? I mean, you know, the Supreme Court ruled on the degree to which the president had immunity from prosecution.

11:41They also kind of, it's a long time ago, Donald Trump won the 2024 election fair and square. No one is doubting any of that. No one is calling that into question. And yet the desire, the endless desire to relitigate it and to, I don't know, persecute anyone who had been part of the attempts to bring Donald Trump down. I understand that it's in Donald Trump's head that that's what he needs to do because he does want vengeance. He does want revenge on some of those people. But why the Senate Judiciary Committee? Well, I think the honest answer is you have a number of senators on that committee who were involved in the effort to frustrate the peaceful transfer of power.

12:23You have a number of those senators who came under the scope of the investigation because they had been engaged with the White House and states that were trying to put forward, you know, fake electors to decertify the election. And so a number of them were under scrutiny. And it appears that the response in the past few years has been to go after the prosecutors for fear that if power changes hands again at the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice, that they might come back under scrutiny. And so you see that with people in the U.S. Senate like Senator Josh Hawley, you know, who there's that famous photo of him raising his fist outside the Capitol on January 6th before the riot, sort of showing solidarity with the protesters and prepared to go challenge the certification of the election results.

13:12And of course, there's the security camera footage hours later of Josh Hawley scurrying out of the Capitol in panic as the rioters enter the building. But many of those senators stood their ground and said that the 2020 election was stolen. Now, the thing, John, that they will say they are upset about, and they brought this up a lot in the hearing is those senators are angry that Jack Smith and his investigative team seized their call records. So what happened? And one of the reasons the senators wanted to hold this hearing is that during the course of the investigation, Jack Smith and team needed to show the conspiracy between Donald Trump and sitting members of Congress to frustrate the peaceful transfer of power.

13:54So they needed to know who Donald Trump was talking to and who on Capitol Hill was trying to get in touch with Donald Trump. And so they subpoenaed the phone records of certain senators. Now, importantly, Jack Smith emphasized in this hearing that what he did not get was the content of any communications. He wasn't wiretapping any of these senators. He got call logs that basically show this phone number called this phone number, which they needed to figure out who was engaged in this, what Smith continued to refer to as a criminal scheme. But of course, Republicans would not let that go about the call logs with a number of them, including Ted Cruz, grandstanding about how Jack Smith had violated their rights, violated the Constitution's speech and debate clause, which protects communications of Congress, and trying to hold his feet over the fire on that aspect of the investigation.

14:49Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? I suppose on the most sort of zoomed out macro level, this is a battle for the writing of history isn't it this is a battle over whether you know history is going to judge that on january the 6th something terrible happened in america or these were good patriots trying to stop a sham election being implemented and i suppose you know if you're donald trump that battle goes on although i will know hasn't donald trump on truth social got an AI tool now where if you put in the question, who won the 2020 presidential election, it says Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

15:34It does. It does. And, you know, it's one of those self-owns that you can only find inside of a Trump administration. But, you know, there was a parallel reality on full display there in the hearing yesterday, John. You had a lot of senators still sort of doubting that Jack Smith's investigation had any basis whatsoever in the facts and the rule of law. But what was interesting about that is Jack Smith kept bringing the receipts throughout the hearing, and that's why I think he requested to go testify. He was very convicted he would know more than these senators would know because he, of course, had run the investigation.

16:16He had spent years in these investigations making sure he followed lawful process. So, for instance, when Lindsey Graham's sister, the late Lindsey Graham, his sister Darlene, who took his place in the Senate, questioned Jack Smith, there was this back and forth where she basically said something to the effect of how dare you steal my brother's phone records and do you think he was a criminal in this scheme? And she sort of went on and on in this hostile line of questioning, and Jack Smith sort of paused and composed himself, and he said, Senator, I actually think your brother was a patriot. I had a great deal of respect for him, and based on the information we developed, I believe he would have been a witness for the prosecution.

17:04And it was sort of this moment that created silence in the hearing. And what Jack Smith basically went on to allude is that he implied that Lindsey Graham was essentially cooperating with the prosecution, had provided perhaps in interviews enough information to help fortify the prosecution's case against Donald Trump on the effort to overturn the election. That was yet another remarkable moment where these Republicans were trying to play gotcha, but Jack Smith got them first. Yeah. And I wonder how this plays out. I mean, look, we are weeks out from a midterm election where I suspect probably people's focus is much more on affordability, the price of gas, all the rest of it that is causing so many Americans so much grief right now.

17:52But I just wonder for the Republican Party what the upside is they think electorally, politically in doing all of this. Well, I think their logic is that there is one man they have to continue to please, and the person who this all matters the most for is Donald Trump. And as much as we have been talking about in recent weeks on this program that Republican senators and congressmen have been trying to create distance between themselves and the White House because Donald Trump's numbers are sagging politically, he's still the leader of the party. He's still the person that is playing kingmaker within the GOP, and as a number of these senators consider higher office, they know that if there is one litmus test in Donald Trump's Republican Party, it's that you have to continue to claim that the 2020 election was stolen and that Donald Trump was persecuted.

18:48So you saw people in that hearing yesterday, even the Ted Cruz's of the world who want to challenge J.D. Vance, the vice president for the presidency if J.D. runs in 2028. You saw people even like Ted Cruz go out there and accuse Jack Smith of weaponizing the Justice Department. And there's this moment where Ted Cruz cites the play Les Mis to try to make his point. Take a listen. We'll talk about it on the backside. Javert from Les Mis would look at you with astonishment. I believe you have no regrets. I believe you have convinced yourself that this witch hunt targeting half the country for partisan ends was justified.

19:32Well, let me say you have brought the Department of Justice into disrepute and you have done enormous damage. And I believe your conduct represents the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the Department of Justice. Wow. Strong words there from Senator Ted Cruz. Is that the same Department of Justice, which now has a banner hanging down from the roof to the pavement with a large picture of Donald Trump on it. I mean, because if you're talking about the weaponization of a justice system and a justice system, which is meant to be one of the three co-equal branches of government, why does it seem it is Donald Trump's Justice Department today?

20:25Well, you know, I recently learned, John, and I should have known this, that there's not just one banner over the Department of Justice. There are multiple. And I learned that because we were shooting a documentary in Washington, D.C., and supposed to be standing in front of one of those banners in front of the Department of Justice, talking with former prosecutors about what has happened at that department. And the people we were supposed to be meeting with didn't show up, and the production crew couldn't figure out why. Well, it's because they had gone to one of the other banners on one of the other sides of the street.

21:00So multiple sides of the U.S. Department of Justice are draped with Donald Trump's face, but it doesn't stop there. Multiple departments and agencies down the street have Donald Trump's face on them, which I think lends to the notion you're suggesting that more than any president in modern history, Donald J. Trump has sought to take control of the U.S. Department of Justice and has systematically, according to a lot of the prosecutors who've been fired from the Justice Department or let go has systematically turned off investigations into the president's allies and turned on new investigations into his foes, including efforts to go after Jack Smith himself.

21:43Remember, when Smith testified before the U.S. House of Representatives in the House Judiciary Committee, which is led by Republican Jim Jordan, one of the very first things the committee did after the hearing was refer Jack Smith to the Justice Department for having lied under oath during his testimony. Now, nothing has come of that, but they tried to claim that they caught him in a lie while he was testifying, and they wanted him to be prosecuted. It's one of the reasons why Senate Republicans were so intent in this hearing on claiming that Jack Smith lied because they wanted to be able to make additional criminal referrals to the Justice Department to say that the man lied under oath to try to catch him in a trap so that one of Donald Trump's biggest foes, if not his biggest foe, at least as it relates to the 2020 election, could potentially himself be prosecuted.

22:38Just across the road from Congress is the Supreme Court, a magnificent neoclassical building. And of lady justice wearing a blindfold because justice is blind. It doesn't seem to be that blind right now. In a moment, we'll be back with an Ivy League university and a big question of justice there too.

23:17The news coming out of Cornell University about what they did regarding a Jane Doe. For those of you who may not know, it has just been revealed that in 2024, just about two years ago, seven men drugged and gang raped a 20 year old woman. They lured her in to a fraternity house. They drugged her with ketamine. They then posted to a group chat that she was incapacitated, and seven men took turns gang raping her for seven hours. Their fraternity knew. This was reported to Cornell University. And after looking into this matter, they expelled two of them and made the rest write essays as their form of punishment.

24:18I want to be clear that the culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia is protected in elite institutions across the United States, and including Cornell University in this instance. That voice you hear is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is speaking about this controversy that is engulfing the nation here in the United States about, as she described, a sexual assault that happened several years ago on the campus of Cornell University. And as you heard AOC say, this was a case that university law enforcement had investigated, local law enforcement had investigated, but was basically kept within Cornell channels and handled through its sort of internal disciplinary process, which ended up in those expulsions, she explained, but no actual prosecutions.

25:19Now, earlier this month, the Jane Doe in that case, the woman who alleges she was sexually assaulted, filed a civil lawsuit against the university and the men involved, basically laying out her assault, pointing the finger at the prosecutors who hadn't brought a case. And that has since led to extraordinary pressure on the university and on the district attorney to reopen that investigation, which they have now done. But what this has brought to the surface is what AOC and others are saying is a culture of rape that still exists at elite universities in the United States and that still has not been dealt with in this country.

26:07And that is something that, John, is now going to become, I think, a lasting political issue here in the United States. Yeah, I mean, if it wasn't so serious and so utterly depressing to listen to, it would almost be comedy. The idea that an elite academic institution in the US, the equivalent of Oxbridge in the UK, gives as its punishment to a number of students who were alleged to have taken part in this gang rape is to write an essay. I mean, that's what you do when you're at university. You write essays and the idea that the university authorities think that is a just punishment shows some pretty weird judgments on the part of the university.

26:52But it's also become wider than that, hasn't it? Because it's not just now about did this gang rape happen? It's about women saying, my God, what is happening in our country that this gets brushed under the carpet, that there is no prosecution in 2024, or that the DA's office decide that there is no need for further action to take place. And on the other side of the ledger, in the Manosphere, you've got people saying, why is this woman on the basis of very flimsy evidence when she was clearly intoxicated when she went to this fraternity house, you know, ruining the lives of seven good men who just may have been a bit boisterous.

27:32And you feel a culture war separation starting to take place over what should be a very, very serious case where justice needs to be served. Well, you know, John, the prosecutor in this case, the district attorney who did not originally bring charges when the complaint was brought to him, came out yesterday and was very defensive and said, you know, we had looked at the evidence and what's in this civil lawsuit is very different than what the victim had told us several years ago. If we had known what was in the civil lawsuit, we would have brought the case forward. But what was interesting is that a number of the things that the district attorney did have several years ago, people considered extraordinarily damning.

28:22And that prosecutor had pointed to the fact that the young woman had told campus police that she had originally voluntarily gone to engage in sexual relations with two individuals at that fraternity house, but that they had done drugs. Things had gotten hazy. Other people had been involved. And in these messages that were obtained, she expressed that there had been some sort of blurriness in the course of that night and that she was sort of unhappy that there were these other guys that came into the room. There were doubts in there. There were things that the Jane Doe and her lawyers said were very obviously threads that a prosecutor, a good prosecutor should have gone forward and investigated and are evidence of the fact that there's this sort of double standard in the justice system that women still aren't necessarily believed, which I've got to say.

29:19You know, you've heard me talk a lot, John, about recent conversations that I've been having with the survivors of the Jeffrey Epstein abuse, people who were in the Epstein network. And you hear this again and again and again from those victims that there are 1 ,400 women and girls who were sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein. And some of them have spent almost 25 years trying to get the attention of law enforcement. And we all know where we are with that investigation, which is the president of the United States shut that investigation down without any justice yet being secured for those victims.

30:01So this is something that goes far beyond Cornell and is a social reckoning here in the United States. But I honestly listening and kind of reading about the Cornell case took my mind back to the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh when he was going to be appointed to the Supreme Court of Justice. Now, the parallels aren't exact. There was no allegation of rape against Brett Kavanaugh, who's now a Supreme Court justice, one of the nine most important people in America with that kind of job for life. But there were allegations of sexual assault and it wasn't a fraternity house. It was when he was still in high school at Georgetown Prep.

30:38And the accusation was that he'd sexually assaulted this woman, Christine Blasey Ford, who was now a professor at Palo Alto University. and what was striking about that hearing as well and this kind of relates to the first half of our discussion on the podcast today is that if you shout loud enough then you get the president's ear and you get his support and brett kavanaugh was kind of almost sinking under the allegations from christine blasey ford until he went before the judiciary committee to kind of argue his case in the confirmation hearing to say you're just weaponizing the justice you're democrats you're kind of this, you're that.

31:13And suddenly he was making it as political as it could be. And that secured his nomination when he started to really fight back hard. And it's not about justice, it feels to me. It feels about shouting. It's about screaming. It's about kind of punching the other person in the face as hard as you can to win the argument. Well, and it seems the only remedy to that, John, is when the victims are humanized instead of dehumanized. And we heard a statement this week from the attorney for the Jane Doe, a man named Thomas Geofra, which tried to give more insight into how difficult this has been for the victim.