Former special counsel Jack Smith to testify in front of House Judiciary Committee
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith (C) arrives to testify during a closed-door deposition before the House Judiciary Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on December 17, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Former special counsel Jack Smith, who charged President Donald Trump with crimes in Florida and Washington, D.C., is set to testify in public before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday.
Smith was tasked with investigating Trump’s alleged interference in the 2020 election and alleged mishandling of classified documents — and his alleged refusal to turn them back over to the government.
Smith asked the judge overseeing the election interference case to dismiss it after Trump’s election in 2024 due to a long-standing Justice Department policy that bars the prosecution of a sitting president. And he filed a motion to dismiss the appeal of the classified documents case for the same reason.
Trump has denied wrongdoing in both cases.
This will mark Smith’s second time before the committee — he appeared behind closed doors last month. It is customary for former special counsels to appear before Congress publicly to discuss their findings.
Chairman Jim Jordan told ABC News that the committee always intended to have Smith appear in public.
“He’ll be there in a public setting so the country can see that this was no different than all the other lawfare weaponization of government going after President Trump,” Jordan said. “Jack Smith is sort of the culmination of that whole effort to stop President Trump from getting to the White House. But thank goodness it didn’t work and the American people saw through it.”
Smith, according to his team, is voluntarily appearing before the committee and will utilize his experience as a nonpartisan prosecutor.
He will also say that the facts of Trump’s cases would lead to a prosecution of anyone, whether they were a Democrat or Republican, his team said.
In his closed-door testimony, Smith defended his decision to twice bring charges against Trump — telling lawmakers his team “had proof beyond reasonable doubt in both cases” that Trump was guilty of the charges in the 2020 election interference and classified documents cases, according to a transcript of the hearing.
And Smith fervently denied that there was any political influence behind his decision — contrary to allegations of Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, who requested the testimony — such as pressure from then-President Joe Biden or then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, the transcripts shows.
“No,” Smith responded continuously to those allegations, according to the transcript.
Just over an hour before his testimony on Dec. 17, the Department of Justice sent an email to Smith’s lawyers preventing him from discussing the classified documents case, according to the 255-page transcript of the deposition, released last year by the Judiciary Committee along with a video of the hearing.
This meant Smith was unable to answer most questions on that case and the deposition — intended to ask questions about the alleged weaponization of the DOJ against Trump and his allies — mainly focused on the 2020 election case instead.
His team also said Smith will comply with Judge Aileen Cannon’s order that blocked the release of the second volume of his report.
Smith’s counsel said the DOJ also refused to send a lawyer to advise Smith on whether his statements were in line with their determination of what he could or could not say regarding the cases, according to the deposition. Smith did say, however, that Trump “tried to obstruct justice” in the classified documents investigation “to conceal his continued retention of those documents.
Becky Pepper Jackson competes in discus and shot put on the girls high school track and field team in her West Virginia hometown. (ABC News)
(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Tuesday will for the first time wade into the heated national debate over whether transgender girls should be allowed to participate in girls’ and women’s sports.
The justices will hear arguments in a pair of cases from Idaho and West Virginia, where federal courts have blocked state laws that would prohibit trans girls from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity.
The outcome of the cases will determine the fate of those laws and similar measures in 27 other states. There are an estimated 122,000 transgender American teens who participate in high school sports nationwide, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School.
Lower courts have concluded separately that the bans discriminate “on the basis of sex” in violation of Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that has promoted equal opportunities for women and girls in athletics, and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
The states are asking the justices to overturn those decisions and reinstate their laws, arguing that sex and gender identity are not synonymous when it comes to women’s athletics and that allowing transgender girls to compete against cisgender girls is unfair and unsafe.
“It really comes down to one simple question,” said West Virginia Attorney General John McCuskey in an interview with ABC News. “Is it legal and constitutional for states to delineate their athletic playing fields based on the immutable physical characteristics that people have that are associated with their sex that’s assigned at birth?”
Becky Pepper Jackson, a high school sophomore from Bridgeport, West Virginia, who competes in discus and shot put on the track and field team, brought the legal challenge to her state’s law in 2021. She is the only known openly trans athlete in West Virginia in any sport.
“Someone has to do it. Someone has to do this for all of us,” Becky, 15, told ABC News in an exclusive interview. “Otherwise these laws and bills are just going to stand.”
Transgender athletes make up just over 1% of the more than 8 million teenage student athletes nationwide, according to the Williams Institute.
Idaho college student Lindsay Hecox, a former track and cross-country runner who was barred from trying out for her school teams, sued over her state’s ban in 2020. Last year, she asked the court to drop her case because she no longer wished to compete in sports and didn’t want to be in the spotlight. However, Idaho fought to keep the case alive.
“Everyone has had the experience of being told, look, you can’t play. You have to sit on the bench, or you can’t make the team. And everyone knows how that feels,” said Sasha Jean Buchert, an attorney with Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ advocacy group involved with the cases.
“That’s what’s happening to transgender kids right now,” Buchert said. “And the scope of [these bans] is absolutely absurd.”
Becky, who has openly identified as a girl since third grade, said she has never undergone male puberty, thanks to puberty-blocking medication, and has no physiological advantage over her peers.
“She has testosterone from her adrenal glands just like every female out there, but that’s the only testosterone she has,” said her mother, Heather Jackson. “She’s actually not the biggest person on her team. There’s people taller than her; there’s people shorter than her. She’s just an average female teenager.”
As a young cross-country runner, Becky was consistently at the back of the pack. More recently, she earned a spot in the state championship for discus and shot put, where she placed third and eighth, respectively.
“I put in time over the summer and after practices just trying to improve my technique and get better,” she said.
Her performance at an eighth grade track meet in 2024 drew protests from other athletes who claimed she made them uncomfortable in the locker room and on the field.
“I just didn’t think it was right,” said Sabrina Shriver, 16, a former discus thrower who refused to compete against Becky at the meet and later quit the sport because of her participation in the league. “It was just, I don’t know, we all just felt uncomfortable and we’re just, we didn’t want any part of it.”
The competitive advantage boys and men have physically over girls and women has been well established in physically demanding sports by medical research and serves as a primary basis for distinctions between the sexes in athletics.
Studies have shown testosterone produced during male puberty does lead to more muscle mass, larger hearts and lungs, greater body height and longer limbs on average for boys and men, according to the American College of Sports Medicine.
Before puberty, however, “sex differences in athletic performance are minimal,” the group says research shows.
A key issue in the West Virginia case is a dispute over whether Becky, 15, possesses an advantage at all, given she has not undergone male puberty, takes estrogen supplements and does not produce high levels of testosterone.
“If [sports leagues] look at the medical records of individuals like the Olympic committee does, testing people — they test for performance enhancing medications or drugs that their athletes take — so if we can look at those levels, let’s look at her levels,” Heather Jackson said.
McCuskey says a testing regimen is just not practicable and that Becky can still compete, but on a boys team. “We have to be able to draw a line here,” he said.
“Becky is bigger and stronger and faster than the females that she’s competing against,” said the attorney general.
He has urged the Supreme Court to stay out of the debate, arguing in a court brief that West Virginia’s law “implicates ‘fierce scientific and policy debates’ that elected legislators are best able to resolve.”
The U.S. Olympic Committee, the NCAA and 29 states ban transgender girls and women from competing on teams consistent with their gender identity. The other 21 states do not have bans, including California and New York, which have laws explicitly allowing trans athletes to compete.
Last year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upheld a Tennessee law banning some gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors, rejecting claims that the law discriminated “on the basis of sex” and saying that states should have leeway to regulate health care in an area of scientific uncertainty.
In 2020, however, the Court concluded in a landmark decision that a Michigan transgender woman fired by her employer for being transgender was discriminated against “on the basis of sex” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Justice Neil Gorsuch explained in his majority opinion that her termination was “for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex.”
Becky, Lindsay, and their attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal say the same reasoning should be applied to sports bans.
“There’s been a number of setbacks that we’ve experienced over the last few years in the courts, but I do have a sense of optimism with this case in light of the fact that the legal issues at play here are some of the same issues at play five years ago,” said Buchert, the Lambda Legal attorney.
Notwithstanding the legal arguments, 69% of Americans say transgender girls should only be allowed to play on boys teams, according to a June 2025 Gallup survey.
The Trump administration also supports the exclusion of transgender athletes from sports teams. An executive order signed in February 2025 says “it is the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.”
Becky says, while she understands public opinion, she is unable to “go against who I am.”
“I’ve been a girl forever,” she said, “and playing on the guys’ team is going backwards.”
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) talks to reporters after former President Bill Clinton did not appear for a closed-door deposition in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on January 13, 2026 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — The chairman of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee said the panel will move forward with contempt of Congress proceedings against former President Bill Clinton after he failed to appear for a subpoenaed deposition on Tuesday as part of the panel’s investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The committee had threatened to hold the former president and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress if they did not appear for separate scheduled closed depositions set for Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively.
“I think everyone knows by now, Bill Clinton did not show up. And I think it’s important to note that this subpoena was voted on in a bipartisan manner by this committee. This wasn’t something that I just issued as chairman of the committee. This was voted on by the entire committee in a unanimous vote of the House Oversight Committee to subpoena former President Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,” Oversight Chairman James Comer said Tuesday morning.
“We will move next week in the House Oversight Committee markup to hold former President Clinton in contempt of Congress,” Comer, a Republican, later added.
A lawyer for the Clintons, David Kendall, has not responded to requests for comment on whether Hillary Clinton will appear on Capitol Hill for her Wednesday subpoenaed deposition.
In a four-page letter posted on social media Tuesday morning, the Clintons publicly called out Comer for threatening to hold them in contempt of Congress.
“Despite everything that needs to be done to help our country, you are on the cusp of bringing Congress to a halt to pursue a rarely used process literally designed to result in our imprisonment. This is not the way out of America’s ills, and we will forcefully defend ourselves,” the letter states.
The Clintons contend in the letter that Comer’s approach to the committee’s work on the Epstein investigation has “prevented progress in discovering the facts about the government’s role” and that the chairman has “done nothing” to force the Justice Department to comply with its disclosure obligations required by Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed late last year.
“We have tried to give you the little information that we have,” the Clintons wrote. “We’ve done so because Mr. Epstein’s crimes were horrific. If the Government didn’t do all it could to investigate and prosecute these crimes, for whatever reason, that should be the focus of your work — to learn why and to prevent that from happening ever again. There is no evidence that you are doing so.”
For months, Republicans on the committee have been demanding that the Clintons provide testimony to lawmakers, citing the former president’s travels on Epstein’s private aircraft in the early 2000s and the Clinton “family’s past relationship” with Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. The panel initially issued subpoenas for the Clintons on Aug. 5 to appear in October.
Kendall has continued to argue that the couple has no information relevant to the committee’s investigation of the federal government’s handling of investigations into Epstein and Maxwell, and should not be required to appear for in-person testimony. Kendall has contended that the Clintons should be permitted to provide the limited information they have to the committee in writing.
“There is simply no reasonable justification for compelling a former President and Secretary of State to appear personally, given that their time and roles in government had no connection to the matter at hand,” Kendall wrote in one of the letters sent to the committee in October of last year. He argued that the committee should excuse the Clintons, as the committee had done for five former attorneys general who were each excused after certifying to the committee that they had no relevant knowledge.
Bill Clinton has not been accused of wrongdoing and denies having any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. No Epstein survivor or associate has ever made a public allegation of wrongdoing or inappropriate behavior by the former president in connection with his prior relationship with Epstein.
Former Secretary of State Clinton “has no personal knowledge of Epstein or Maxwell’s criminal activities, never flew on his aircraft, never visited his island, and cannot recall ever speaking to Epstein. She has no personal knowledge of Maxwell’s activities with Epstein,” Kendall wrote. “President Clinton’s contact with Epstein ended two decades ago, and given what came to light much after, he has expressed regret for even that limited association,” an Oct. 6 letter to the committee says.
Comer wrote in a letter to Kendall in October that the committee is “skeptical” that the Clintons have only limited information and stated it was up to the committee, not the Clintons, to make determinations of the value of the information.
“[T]he Committee believes that it should be provided in a deposition setting, where the Committee can best assess its breadth and value,” Comer wrote.
Last month, in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the Justice Department released several photographs of former President Clinton apparently taken during his international travels with Epstein and Maxwell from 2002 to 2003, although the released photographs contained no information identifying when or where they were taken. Following that disclosure, a spokesperson for the two-term Democratic president argued that the Trump administration released those images to shield the Trump White House “from what comes next, or from what they’ll try to hide forever.”
“So, they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be,” Clinton’s spokesperson Angel Ureña wrote on X Dec. 22.
Ureña did not respond to an email inquiry from ABC News on Monday.
What is contempt of Congress?
The House of Representatives can hold an individual “in contempt” if that person refuses to testify or comply with a subpoena. The contempt authority is considered an implied power of Congress.
“Congress’s contempt power is the means by which Congress responds to certain acts that in its view obstruct the legislative process. Contempt may be used either to coerce compliance, to punish the contemnor, and/or to remove the obstruction,” according to a report from the Congressional Research Service.
Any person summoned as a congressional witness who refuses to comply can face a misdemeanor charge that carries a fine of up to $100,000 and up to a year in prison if that person is eventually found guilty.
What would the process look like?
To hold someone in contempt of Congress, the Oversight Committee would first mark up and then vote to advance the contempt resolution. Once the committee approves the resolution, which is expected given the GOP majority, the resolution now could go to a vote in the full House.
A simple majority is needed to clear a contempt resolution on the floor. Notably, it does not require passage in the Senate.
The resolution, if passed, would direct the speaker of the House to refer the case to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia — under the Department of Justice — for possible criminal prosecution.
History of contempt
Congress has held Cabinet officials in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a House subpoena, including Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in 2019 and then-Attorney General Eric Holder in 2012. The DOJ never prosecuted them even though the House voted to hold them in contempt.
The House held Peter Navarro, a former top trade adviser in the Trump administration, in contempt of Congress in 2022 for defying a subpoena to provide records and testimony to the now-defunct House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Navarro was sentenced to jail time.
Steve Bannon, a Trump ally, was also held in contempt of Congress in 2022 for not complying with the Jan. 6 select committee. Bannon was also sentenced to prison time.
The GOP-led House voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress in 2024 over the DOJ failing to provide audio of then-President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur. The DOJ did not prosecute the case, but the audio was released.
U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly speaks on the failed grand jury indictment against him during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on February 11, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Heather Diehl/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — In a biting opinion that chastised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Republican-appointed judge on Thursday blocked the Defense Department from trying to punish Sen. Mark Kelly over a video he and other Democrats made urging service members not to follow illegal orders, accusing Hegseth of “trampling” on the Arizona senator’s First Amendment rights and suggesting Hegseth should be more “grateful” for the wisdom of retired service members.
“This Court has all it needs to conclude that Defendants have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees,” Washington D.C. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon wrote in his opinion.
Leon sharply questioned Trump administration lawyers on whether there was legal precedent for the Defense Department’s attempt to demote and reduce retirement benefits for Kelly, who has been sharply critical of the White House.
“Rather than trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers, Secretary Hegseth and his fellow Defendants might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions and debate on military matters in our Nation over the past 250 years,” Leon wrote. “If so, they will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the first Amendment in the Bill of Rights! Hopefully this injunction will in some small way help bring about a course correction in the Defense Department’s approach to these issues.”
The Justice Department could appeal the decision, although it’s not clear if it would. The Pentagon and Hegseth on Thursday did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The case has drawn considerable attention as a major test of the First Amendment rights of military veterans and the government’s separation of powers. Kelly was suing the Pentagon for threatening to demote him in rank and reduce his military retirement benefits because of a video he made with other Democrats that urged troops not to comply with illegal orders, which they did not specify.
Hegseth accused Kelly of violating a federal law that prohibits undermining good order and discipline within the military and accused him of hiding behind his position as a U.S. senator to do so.
In a video posted online to social media on Thursday, Kelly said he is grateful for the judge’s opinion.
“I appreciate the judge’s careful consideration of this case and the clarity of his ruling, but I also know that this might not be over yet, because this president and this administration do not know how to admit when they’re wrong,” he said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
