Thursday’s House Judiciary hearing was a spectacle the American people needed to see — and not because it advanced any noble cause. Former special counsel Jack Smith took the stand to defend two politically explosive prosecutions of Donald Trump, and Republicans pressed him hard about the timetable and tactics that produced those indictments.
Rep. Russell Fry of South Carolina cut to the heart of the matter when he highlighted the absurdity of asking a defendant to prepare for trial against the clock while sifting through mountains of discovery. Fry pointed out that the pace Smith sought would have required digesting millions of pages in impossibly short order, a reality that makes a mockery of due process and ordinary fairness.
The prosecution’s insistence on a “speedy” timetable smacks less of legal principle than of political timetable-setting. Republicans on the committee rightly noted that Smith urged compressed deadlines — a move that would have forced defense teams to read through evidentiary mountains at a rate no human could sustain if a fair shot at trial was the objective. This isn’t zealous lawyering; it’s weaponized scheduling.
Smith offered the familiar refrain that the law applies to everyone and defended his choices as an effort to honor the public’s right to a speedy trial, but his defenders conveniently ignore the context and consequences. Saying “no one is above the law” rings hollow when the Justice Department applies wildly different standards to political opponents and allies. The committee’s questioning exposed how process can be used as punishment rather than truth-seeking.
Independent analysts and even former prosecutors have observed the practical unfairness of rushing monumental discovery into a condensed pretrial calendar — a contrast stark against the usual pace most defendants receive. If your average January 6 defendant gets years to prepare, insisting the nation’s one-time president be ready for trial in months looks less like justice and more like a political play designed to influence an election calendar. The optics and the practice are both rotten.
Republicans on the committee, including Fry, deserve credit for pushing back hard. It takes backbone to stand up to a politicized federal apparatus and insist that Americans get the same rules and reasonable timelines as everyone else, not special treatment when convenient and harsh treatment when it’s politically useful. That kind of oversight is exactly what the framers expected from a coequal branch when the executive goes rogue.
Americans should watch these hearings closely and demand two things: real accountability for any abuses of prosecutorial power, and a justice system that treats all citizens the same under the law. Our republic cannot survive if legal tools are wielded as partisan weapons against political rivals; fairness, transparency, and equal treatment must be restored so hardworking Americans can trust the system again.
