Rachel Maddow

In this primetime recap of tonight's hearing, we are going to go through some of the conspiracy theories that Republican members of Congress raised in the room, including a wild one that may be the key to making this all go away, is that maybe Jack Smith wasn't sworn in right?

When he took his oath of office, he's left-handed, so maybe it was the... That'll do it.

We'll talk tonight about Republicans perhaps inadvertently cutting the knees out from their own criticism of Jack Smith getting phone records about the alleged co-conspirators in the case calling members of Congress.

In their actions today, they undercut that allegation they were simultaneously making in the hearing.

We're going to talk about Republican Congressman Troy Nels.

baiting and sniping at the police officers who were in the room today, causing a disruption in the room, causing some choice swearing.

We're gonna get to all of that tonight.

Congressman Jamie Raskin is gonna be joining us live here tonight.

He pulled a rabbit out of a hat at the very, very end of the hearing.

As Jim Jordan was trying to gavel the hearing to a close, Jamie Raskin jumped in and sprung something on everyone.

It apparently means that we may hear from Jack Smith again.

That was much to the surprise of the Republicans today when they learned that live and in the moment from Jamie Raskin, as we all did watching it on TV.

So we're gonna talk with Congressman Raskin about that coming up.

But I will just finish with this, and then we're gonna hear from everybody.

To my mind, if you only took away one thing from the hearing today,

It was this next exchange between Jack Smith and a Vermont Congresswoman named Becca Bolland.

It was an exchange about basically what it means to be Jack Smith right now in 2026, to have done the investigation that he did, to have found what he found, to have served your country by sticking to your guns, even when that meant the leader of the United States government and his party and his supporters would try to destroy you for it.

Jack Smith, I will not be intimidated.

I'm not going to pretend those serious crimes didn't happen just because he's threatening me.

As I said before, I will not be intimidated.