Jack Smith defends secret subpoenas of congress phone records

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Transcript

00:00I want to start by addressing or starting on the issue about the collection of call records

00:05related to certain members of Congress. You recall the majority asking you about this at

00:09length in the first two rounds so far today? Yes. Did Donald Trump and his co-conspirators

00:16try to reach out to members of Congress before January 6th and on January 6th of 2021? Yes.

00:23Can you tell us a little bit about what your investigation uncovered regarding communications

00:28with members of Congress that's related to the attack on the Capitol on January 6th?

00:34There was pretty extensive contact with members of Congress. There were instances of members of

00:47Congress, again specifically on January 6th, but also before that where either they were reaching

00:55out to the White House or the White House was reaching out to them and through conduits to

01:01the president, including, as I said, Mark Miles. Okay. And what was the nature? Let's start with

01:06before January 6th. What was the nature of some of these communications with the White House or with

01:11co-conspirators of Donald Trump leading up to January 6th and members of Congress?

01:15Well, it varied. Sometimes the communications were relevant to us to show that people were telling

01:28Donald Trump that the things he was saying were not true. Other times they were evidence of the

01:35the false nature of the things that we're saying. So for an example would be there are two voicemails

01:46that Rudy Giuliani left for senators and those voicemails show him saying things that were not true

01:55using knowingly false claims to try to get those senators to further delay the certification of the

02:03vote. You just mentioned that there were instances before January 6th of members calling the White

02:10House and I'm summarizing to basically express that some of the claims the president and his

02:15co-conspirators were making were not true. Did you that what you just said? Well, I should be

02:20specific there. There were a variety of reasons that and we're not and I'm not trying to say that

02:26anytime someone contacted the White House, they were involved in a crime themselves or doing anything

02:31improper. But how this conspiracy that was trying to stop the lawful transfer of power, how that worked,

02:41it was important for us to understand. We had evidence from Department of Justice officials that

02:50Donald Trump said to them, just say the election is corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican

02:57congressman. I think given that was the perspective that Donald Trump had, our views that the case we

03:06would have presented at trial would have been Donald Trump preying on the party allegiance of people in

03:14his party. And people like the vice president didn't agree to that. People like the elector from

03:22Pennsylvania, I mentioned, didn't agree to that. People like the Speaker of the House in Arizona didn't agree to

03:27that. But the extent to which those contacts were happening was relevant to our investigation.