CNN’s Elie Honig Rips Republicans for Whiffing on ‘Very Effective and Fair Criticisms’ of Jack Smith at Hearing

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig tore into Senate Republicans for squandering what he argued were legitimate lines of attack against former special counsel Jack Smith during his explosive testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday.

Smith appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend his investigations of President Donald Trump, where he faced hours of heated questioning from Republican lawmakers.

At one point, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) accused Smith of secretly traveling to Atlanta to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, citing text messages he claimed placed Smith at an Atlanta Hawks game. But Schmitt had apparently confused the Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes: Smith said he had attended an Iowa-Maryland women’s basketball game, prompting Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) to admonish Schmitt for not having his “facts straight.”

Speaking on Tuesday’s edition of CNN’s The Arena, Honig, a former federal prosecutor, told fellow panelists, “The way that Republicans have chosen to attack Jack Smith is just not the most effective way to criticize him.”

He continued:

If you want to criticize the guy, you can point out that his entire career leading up to the Trump prosecution was marked by overcharging and overaggression. He had high-profile cases rejected by judges, by juries — unanimously, in one case, by the Supreme Court.

You can point out the fact that he asked for a gag order that violated Donald Trump’s First Amendment right, to the point where a judge and a court of appeals judge overturned Jack Smith’s gag order. You can point to the fact that he insisted on trying Donald Trump four months after an indictment with 13 million pages of discovery. There’s no way Donald Trump could have engaged in due process to prepare for trial.

You can point to the fact that he dumped a whole bunch of information into the public sector in October of 2024 by reversing the rules of criminal procedure. There are very effective and fair criticisms of Jack Smith, but these Republican senators are not on them at all.

Watch the above on CNN.

Jason Cohen contributed to this report.

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