Jack Smith Gives Telling Non-Answer When Asked the Key Trump Question During Deposition

If special counsel Jack Smith intended to project confidence during his Dec. 17 congressional testimony, the result was unmistakably the opposite.

Faced with a direct question about evidence linking President Donald Trump to the Jan. 6 Capitol breach, Smith responded with a rambling answer so evasive it bordered on self-indictment. What should have been a clear, decisive moment instead dissolved into abstractions, insinuations, and legal fog.

Smith did not say President Trump ordered anyone to storm the Capitol. He did not claim Trump planned the violence. He did not even assert that Trump wanted it to occur.

Instead, Smith leaned on a far more nebulous theory: that Trump somehow “caused” the violence by fostering distrust, that he “exploited” events as they unfolded, and that the outcome was “foreseeable.” It was a case built not on commands, coordination, or criminal intent, but on vibes, emotions, and hindsight moralizing.

That distinction matters. When the follow-up question came — the one that actually tests a prosecution’s foundation — Smith’s case quietly imploded. Asked whether there was evidence that Trump instructed anyone to enter the Capitol, Smith answered with a slurry of rhetoric about anger, belief, and distrust. It was an answer designed to sound evidentiary without actually being evidence.

Although the closed-door deposition occurred weeks earlier, House Republicans released the transcript on Wednesday, and it offers a revealing look at what Smith was — and was not — able to say under questioning.

“So did you develop evidence that President Trump, you know, was responsible for the violence at the Capitol on January 6th?”

“So our view of the evidence was that he caused it and that he exploited it and that it was foreseeable to him,” Smith replied.

That sentence is a textbook example of prosecutorial sleight of hand.

“Our view of the evidence” is not evidence; it is interpretation. Smith did not point to an order, a plan, a signal, or even tacit approval of violence. Instead, he substituted causation with conjecture, collapsing legal responsibility into a vague moral narrative where intent is assumed and outcomes are retroactively assigned. Claiming Trump “caused” Jan. 6 without identifying a concrete act that did the causing is not a legal argument — it is a narrative preference.

The rest of Smith’s formulation only weakens the case further. “Exploited it” is a political accusation, not a criminal charge. And “foreseeable” is doing enormous legal work without earning it. If foreseeability becomes the standard, then any politician who addresses an angry crowd is potentially criminally liable for the worst actions of the most unstable listener. Given the incendiary rhetoric routinely deployed by figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Zohran Mamdani, this is a precedent Democrats may want to think twice about endorsing.

After that underwhelming response, Smith was pressed again: “But you don’t have any evidence that he instructed people to crash the Capitol, do you?”

Smith replied with a word salad worthy of Kamala Harris: “As I said, our evidence is that he in the weeks leading up to January 6th created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to State legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware in the days leading up to January 6th that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.”

That is an awful lot of words to avoid saying “no.”

Stripped of rhetorical padding, Smith’s response never answers the question. There is no claim that Trump instructed anyone to breach the Capitol, no allegation of coordination, no evidence of a directive to engage in violence. Instead, Smith advances a theory of ambient guilt — that Trump is culpable not for what he said, but for how others felt after hearing him.

Creating “a level of distrust,” disputing election claims, and speaking to legislatures may be politically controversial, but they are not acts of violence, nor are they illegal on their face.

If emotional agitation and contested political speech become prosecutable offenses, the First Amendment is reduced to a conditional privilege — one enforced only when the government approves of the message. Smith’s framework dangerously warps constitutional law.

Most revealing is Smith’s final maneuver: the claim that Trump “directed them to the Capitol.” That phrasing performs extraordinary legal laundering.

Directing people where to assemble is not the same as directing them to riot, storm, or attack — a distinction Smith carefully avoids acknowledging. His answer relies on inference instead of proof.

And in doing so, it tacitly concedes the central point: there is no evidence President Trump told anyone to crash the Capitol — only an argument that people’s presence, emotions, and later actions can be retroactively laid at his feet.

In the end, Smith’s case rests not on what Trump did, ordered, or intended, but on a theory that speech equals guilt and emotion substitutes for evidence. That is not how criminal law works, and it is certainly not how justice survives in a constitutional republic.

The fact that Jack Smith and Democrats were willing to lower the bar for conviction should alarm Americans across the political spectrum.

Because if that standard ever hardens into precedent, it will not stop with Donald Trump.