The Rachel Maddow Show
MS NOW's special report on the Jack Smith testimony: Prime Time recap Part 1
23 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Start your day with the MS Now daily newsletter. Sharp insights from voices you trust. Standout moments from your favorite shows. And fresh perspectives from experts shaping the news. Sign up at ms.now. Would you please rise and raise your right hand? Jack Smith testifies to Congress. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss my work as special counsel.
The man who indicted Donald Trump in the documents case. Highly sensitive national security information was held in a ballroom and a bathroom. The man who charged Trump for leading a criminal conspiracy to overturn an election. Our investigation revealed that Donald Trump is the person who caused January 6th. The president seeking revenge during the hearing.
Do you believe that President Trump's Department of Justice will find some way to indict you? I believe that they will do everything in their power to do that because they've been ordered to. Republicans go on the attack. You, like the president's men for Richard Nixon, went after your political enemies.
Chapter 2: What are the implications of Jack Smith's testimony?
And the special counsel makes his case. You are correct that the only person charged in this case was Donald Trump, who was the person most culpable for the crimes charged. Tonight. Rachel Maddow, Chris Haynes, Jen Psaki, Lawrence O'Donnell, Stephanie Ruhle, Ari Melber, Andrew Weissman, and an exclusive interview with a ranking Democrat, Jamie Raskin. For us, it's all about the rule of law.
MSNOW's special report on the Jack Smith testimony begins now.
Good evening, and thank you so much for being with us tonight. I'm Rachel Maddow here at the MSNOW Mothership in New York, along with some of my very favorite people in the world. Lawrence O'Donnell is here. Chris Hayes is here. Ari Melber is here. And you wouldn't know it from the cold open. It's like my childhood. But Nicole Wallace is here.
Even though you inexplicably did not get mentioned in the cold open.
I'm very sorry. I feel, yeah. Well, I'm happy to be here. I am here. It's not a hologram. It's me.
You get to be here double, triple time. You get extra passes to be here whenever you want because you were randomly left out of that.
All right.
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Chapter 3: How did Jack Smith describe the criminal investigations of Donald Trump?
We are going to be joined in the course of this special coverage tonight by additional colleagues, Jen Psaki, Stephanie Ruhl, Moore. The gang's all here, especially Nicole.
But the reason we are all here tonight together is for a special primetime recap of the historic hearing that took place in Washington today with Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought 44 felony charges against the man who is now the sitting president of the United States. As special counsel, Jack Smith operated independently within the U.S. Department of Justice.
He and his team of prosecutors and FBI agents investigated Donald Trump. They investigated his efforts to overthrow the U.S. government to try to get the results of the election he lost thrown out so he could stay in power anyway. They then investigated
Chapter 4: What evidence did Jack Smith present regarding January 6th?
his handling of classified information after he left office. But of course, in the American mind, the culmination of Donald Trump's efforts that were investigated by Jack Smith were these images. The violent attack by Trump's supporters on the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
Under Jack Smith's leadership, a grand jury brought four felony charges against Trump in the case to overthrow the US government and stay in power after he lost reelection.
A second federal grand jury brought an additional 40 felony charges against him in the classified documents case for taking huge amounts of highly classified material with him after he left office, an alleged violation of, among other things, the Espionage Act.
I mean, just spelling this all out, saying these words right now, it never stops being astonishing that the person facing those kinds of felony charges was nevertheless elevated by the Republican Party to become their nominee for president of the United States.
Chapter 5: How did Republicans respond to Jack Smith's testimony?
Espionage act and all. But he was their nominee, and he won the general election, and the federal felony criminal charges that Jack Smith and his team brought against Donald Trump were never heard in court. And today, for the first time, Jack Smith testified in an open hearing in Congress about his work, about the evidence his team developed against the man who is now the sitting president.
As Smith remarked several times today, there is no analog for this in US history. Nothing like this has ever happened before. And this historic hearing today didn't disappoint. That said, it did happen starting at 10 a.m. Eastern. It happened right in the middle of the workday or in the middle of the school day. So even though this was a big, important deal, you may very well have missed it.
There's no shame in that. Whether or not you were able to catch some or all of it live, though, we wanted to do this primetime recap basically as our public service to you. So whether or not you were able to watch any of it, you will not have missed a thing.
All right, today's hearing started with Jack Smith making clear the stakes of the crimes that he investigated, the stakes of that investigation being shut down, and the stakes of the punishment that Trump and his Republican loyalists have since pursued against Jack Smith and against everyone in law enforcement who has tried to hold the line against Trump's crimes.
After nearly 30 years of public service, including in international settings, I have seen how the rule of law can erode. My fear is that we have seen the rule of law function in our country for so long that many of us have come to take it for granted. The rule of law is not self-executing. It depends on our collective commitment to apply it.
It requires dedicated service on behalf of others, especially when that service is difficult and comes with costs. Our willingness to pay those costs is what tests and defines our commitment to the rule of law and to this wonderful country.
Our willingness to pay those costs, especially when that service is difficult and comes with costs. That was as much a theme today as any other, both in terms of the conduct of Jack Smith's investigation and the repercussions since.
since all of it has been very much dominated by the willingness, the eagerness of this president and his supporters to do harm, to even do violence to anyone who opposes Donald Trump or tries to stop him from committing what Jack Smith clearly, again and again and again today, described as crimes.
Mr. Smith, if your case had gone to trial, would the evidence from Georgia have helped prove that President Trump knowingly engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election?
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Chapter 6: What did Jack Smith say about the rule of law?
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.
Trump has said that you, Mr. Smith, should be investigated and put in prison.
He called you a disgrace to humanity, a radical left Marxist, a criminal. In fact, Trump has used the words deranged Jack Smith 185 times on Truth Social.
How do you think that these statements have impacted you, your staff, and your investigations? With respect to me, I think the reports, I'm sorry, the statements are meant to intimidate me. I will not be intimidated. I think these statements are also made as a warning to others what will happen if they stand up. And I am, as I say, I'm not going to be intimidated.
We did our work pursuant to department policy. We followed the facts and we followed the law. And that process resulted in proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed serious crimes. I'm not going to pretend that didn't happen because he's threatening me. And Mr. Smith, do you believe that President Trump's Department of Justice will find some way to indict you?
I believe they will do everything in their power to do that because they've been ordered to by the president.
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. Nicole Wallace, what did you take from this hearing today?
Well, what I took from my own reaction was that this was so extraordinary. But before Trump destroyed the Department of Justice, there were hundreds of Jack Smiths inside the Department of Justice. He was the archetype of the kind of person who chose that life instead of you know, being a partner at Paul Weiss and having multiple houses and occasionally flying private.
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Chapter 7: How did the hearing address the handling of classified information?
Yeah. This sense that everything they're doing, the Trump administration, is spectacle, the sort of spectacle of menace, that when an ICE officer actually shoots and kills an American citizen in her car, he has to move the cell phone from his hand to the other hand so he could keep recording as he shoots her. because the generation of content is so important.
Today, we got reporting that when Charlie Kirk was killed, Kash Patel inside the FBI, the first thing he was concerned about was what he could tweet and coordinating with Dan Bongino about what he could tweet, that he wanted to tweet pictures from Windsor Castle with his girlfriend that actually would expose MI5 agents. It's all in New York Times Magazine today. This obsession with spectacle.
And here's Jack Smith is like the ultimate opposite of that, right? Like a sober, solemn, serious person facing down this kind of carnival of that has now become, again, and that's always been part of politics, hearings, as you will attest, right? They're always theatrical. Theatricality is part of politics. I have no problem with that. I talk for a living.
But what is totally absent is any sense of seriousness or moral compass right now in the government we have. And here's this person who just feels like this like archaeological find from another era.
Totally. Yeah, I mean, the aesthetic of it, his asceticism, his stoicism, is itself part of the message.
All right. Jack Smith's headline today was Donald Trump belongs in prison.
Yeah.
That he had the evidence, that the case was moving forward, that he could prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
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Chapter 8: What was the significance of the nondisclosure orders mentioned?
Even Republicans seem to acknowledge that he is a strong and aggressive prosecutor, which is what prosecutors are supposed to be. Donald Trump belongs in prison. That's really something for the country to still see and hear from this person. Second, to echo others, Jack Smith is a sober guy in a drunk bar at 1 a.m.
That's it.
And he stands out more that way. And our job is to try to make sense of this. And you just presented some of those key highlights. People can take it in. People can go online later tonight, tomorrow, watch more. What I saw there, on the scale of public servants, was an especially sober, fair person.
If someone was watching and they're super political and they wanted to see him spar and rebut every type of Republican question that was a little leading or a little over here, he didn't do that. Why did he do that? Because that's not who he is. But they need to discredit him because even with the case closedā He still comes off very credible.
Yes. And more of the case is going to come out if volume two of his report is unsealed by the court. And a lot of people argue that part of the reason this whole hearing might have happened today was to try to muddy him up before the country gets a whole new dose of information based on the evidence that he gathered.
Well, you know, for me, whenever I'm watching congressional hearings, I mourn for the day when they actually used to work. So one thing that was on display was the decline and fall of the congressional hearing. We used to have hearings like this in which both sides were actually trying to find the truth. The Watergate hearings were the example of this.
There was a certain slight amount of Republican defensiveness for Richard Nixon through the beginning of the Watergate hearings. But as the evidence mounted, members responded to the evidence. And what you saw today was this utterly nonsensical display that there's no amount of evidence that could ever be proof to any Republican on that committee of anything. And this is where...
Donald Trump is not to blame for Donald Trump. There could be no Donald Trump without those people. Those are the people, the Republicans in Congress, they are the people who gave this country Donald Trump. They are the people who decided we're not just going to tolerate him. We are going to try to become him.
And so what you saw today were Donald Trump's best students, students in Trumpian lying. They just think they can go into a committee hearing and lie and lie and lie. And during our lifetimes, that was absolutely impossible. If you got caught in a hearing in the center of the House saying something that could be proved to be untrue during the hearing, which was hard before the Internetā
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