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title: "\"I stand by my decisions\""
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Jack Smith defends decisions as special counsel. ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­    ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  

| View in browser September 29, 2026 Good Tuesday evening. In this edition: Jack Smith clashes with Republicans over Trump prosecutions; and AI leaders sign "morally binding" agreement at the White House. Plus, Ratepayer Protection Act, taxpayer-funded ads and Eric Cantor. Special Counsel Former special counsel Jack Smith defended his prosecutions of President Trump during a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, rejecting Republican accusations that his investigations were politically motivated. "I stand by my decisions as special counsel, including my decision to bring charges against President Trump," Mr. Smith said in his opening statement. "I made those decisions without regard to President Trump's political association, activities, beliefs or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election." "I will not be silenced by continued threats of prosecution from the president or others," he added. Mr. Smith said his investigation developed proof "beyond a reasonable doubt" that President Trump had committed "serious crimes." "If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat," he told senators. Mr. Smith was appointed special counsel by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022 and ultimately brought two criminal cases against the then-former president — one accusing him of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election and another accusing him of illegally retaining classified documents and obstructing efforts to recover them. Neither case went to trial after Mr. Smith moved to dismiss them following President Trump's victory in the 2024 election, citing the Justice Department's longstanding position that a sitting president cannot be federally prosecuted. Throughout the hearing, Republicans accused him of abusing the power of the Justice Department to target President Trump and other conservatives. "Mr. Smith's operation was a partisan weapon that broke the rules, lied to the court and engaged in bad faith throughout," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the committee's chair, said in his opening statement. Democrats accused their GOP colleagues of attempting to rewrite history and discredit a legitimate criminal investigation. "Let me be clear: There was nothing untoward about special counsel Smith and his fellow prosecutors conducting this investigation," said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the committee's ranking member. "The aspersions cast on Mr. Smith, nonstop, are petty, personal and political. They are nothing but a smokescreen to distract from the president's own clear, unlawful conduct." Republicans repeatedly grilled Mr. Smith on his decision to subpoena phone records involving GOP lawmakers, which they argued swept too broadly and improperly targeted lawmakers and conservative organizations. Mr. Smith defended obtaining the records as necessary to establish who President Trump and his associates were communicating with as Congress prepared to certify the election results on Jan. 6, 2021. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused him of succeeding "where Richard Nixon failed" by weaponizing the Justice Department against political opponents and told him that he had brought the department "into disrepute." "I understand for the rest of your life you are going to be hailed as a hero in the resistance movement," Sen. Cruz said. "But I will tell you what you have done: You have brought the Department of Justice into disrepute. Because instead of being apolitical, instead of enforcing the law, you willing were conscripted as a foot soldier for the DNC." Mr. Smith pushed back against accusations that the election investigation was partisan by pointing to Republicans who provided some of the most significant evidence in the case, including former Vice President Mike Pence and former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (R). "I personally find it very hard to understand how our investigation can be viewed as partisan when the strongest witnesses, the people who were the difference between the rule of law standing and not, in our case, were Republicans," he said. Another exchange took an unusual turn when Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) confronted Mr. Smith with what he said were text messages showing the former special counsel had attended an Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024, suggesting a possible connection to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who separately prosecuted President Trump in Georgia. "You may think you're a hero in this story, but let me tell you something, you're the villain," Sen. Schmitt said. "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." Mr. Smith denied attending a Hawks game or recalling being in Atlanta. "I really don't think so. It's possible I flew through the Atlanta airport on the way to Florida, but I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta. I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I'm sure of that," he said, prompting Sen. Schmitt to accuse him of perjury. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) later pointed out that Sen. Schmitt appeared to have confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes women's basketball team. Mr. Smith confirmed that he attended a Hawkeyes game at the University of Maryland on Feb. 3, 2024, to see Caitlin Clark play. "That might be the confusion over the names of the team. But perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully," she chided Sen. Schmitt. Watch the Senate hearing, which also re-airs on C-SPAN at 8pm ET. Artificial Intelligence President Trump and some of the world's most powerful tech leaders signed a voluntary agreement aimed at governing the development of artificial intelligence, as the president pushed self-regulation over new government restrictions on the rapidly advancing technology. "It's almost like a constitution in a way, and the biggest people in the world signed that and I signed it as president, and it really is a form of protection," the president told reporters following a White House meeting with top tech leaders. The White House meeting comes at an inflection point for AI, as increasingly advanced systems have raised concerns about the technology's potential risks and prompted calls from some industry leaders for greater safeguards. It included Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Nvidia's Jensen Huang and xAI's Elon Musk, as well as Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Google's Sundar Pichai, among others. President Trump, who called the agreement "morally binding," has favored self-regulation, arguing that additional guardrails could slow U.S. development of advanced AI systems and give China an advantage. "They don't want anything to go wrong. I mean, their companies are at stake if something goes wrong," he said. "This is going to be all for the good, and we're going to have it nice and safe. And they're really going to be policing each other." Mr. Zuckerberg said the agreement is built around companies having "robust internal controls," including internal risk reviews, third-party auditors and reviews of the audits by each company's board of directors. "The idea isn't that this is the only thing that we will ever do," he said. "It is that this is a start and an accord that the whole industry could come to." Mr. Amodei stressed that while AI has "incredible benefits," it also poses "very real risks." "The mechanism, how we address those risks, is still under discussion," he said. "But we all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely." Mr. Musk offered a more optimistic vision, predicting AI and robotics would usher in an "age of abundance." "I think by far the most likely outcome is an age of abundance where we don't have just a universal basic income, we have universal high income," he said. "Jobs are going to change. Jobs have always changed. I think we'll see an evolution of roles." Earlier in the day, President Trump announced the launch of a new AI-powered government website, America.gov, designed to help Americans navigate federal information and services through a chatbot. "Instead of forcing citizens to search through the endless maze of tens of thousands of terrible websites and rules, and more than 10,000 forms … you'll now have one front door for every single question," he said at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC. The president said anyone familiar with other AI chatbots would know how to use the new site, which the administration describes as a "single digital point of entry for Americans to access Federal government information or services online." "Americans currently spend over 10 billion hours per year on government paperwork. We're giving those 10 billion hours back to the American people," he said. "America.gov is a declaration to the world that every citizen of our nation will be treated with respect and dignity." Watch the AI meeting, their comments to reporters, and the America.gov launch. In other news… Senate Democrats are expected to block passage of the Ratepayer Protection Act, a bill that aims to shield Americans from rising electricity costs associated with the proliferation of data centers. Despite passing the House earlier this month in a 417–3 vote, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the bill a "fraud," arguing that it doesn't go far enough to address the issue. "Americans are demanding real guardrails on AI and data centers, but all the Republicans offer is a toothless messaging bill," he said on the Senate floor. The bill is championed in the upper chamber by Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH), who is running in a tough reelection campaign against former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). Republicans need at least seven Democrats to advance the bill when it comes to the floor Wednesday. Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) blocked a resolution introduced by Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) that would have denounced the Trump administration's use of taxpayer dollars to fund a series of ads promoting President Trump. The ads have been running on broadcast and cable networks, with one nearly identical to a video President Trump released during his 2024 campaign. Congressional Democrats say the Trump administration used $20 million in Homeland Security Department funds for the broader ad campaign, potentially violating federal law. The White House says the ads are public service announcements, and Sen. Lummis compared them to an antidrug campaign President Clinton ran while in office. "When a Democratic president tells Americans what to do, it's a public service," she said. "When this president tells Americans that liberty is worth defending, it's a problem." Eric Cantor, the former House Republican majority leader, was named the next president and CEO of PhRMA, one of the nation's most powerful lobbying groups representing the pharmaceutical industry. "Eric is well respected among policy leaders in Washington and around the world, with a long track record of working effectively across the political spectrum to achieve important outcomes that have a lasting impact," the organization said in a statement. Mr. Cantor lost his 2014 Republican primary to Tea Party-backed challenger David Brat, becoming the first sitting House majority leader to lose a primary. He has since served as vice chairman and managing director at investment bank Moelis & Company. For your radar… The Senate Health Committee votes Wednesday on the nomination of Dr. Nicole Saphier to be surgeon general. Watch LIVE on C-SPAN2 at 9:45am ET. Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here C-SPAN is on YouTube. Subscribe today for live coverage, consequential moments, memorable exchanges and the political events everyone will be talking about. Full Schedule Copyright © 2026 C-SPAN, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in. 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