The Situation: What Were House Republicans Thinking?

The Situation on Dec. 30 closed out the year 2025 with some comments on the meta-Situation.

The following day, with the year all but over and people’s attention already turned to New Year’s Eve parties, House Republicans releasedvideo and transcript of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s deposition testimony before the House Judiciary Committee:

The release was unexpected—at least by me.

House Republicans had, after all, declined to allow Smith to testify in public. Yet here was video of the marathon testimony less than two weeks after it had taken place. What was the point of insisting on a private deposition if only to make the whole thing public days later? 

Perhaps, I reasoned on sitting down to listen to all eight hours of it, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan thinks he landed major blows on Smith and wants the public to see Smith grilling.

Apparently not. I have seldom seen, heard, or read better prepared testimony by anyone—on any subject.

Smith’s Republican interrogators didn’t land a glove on him. Smith was polite, firm, and factual. I emerged from the deposition genuinely unsure what service Jordan thinks he is doing himself and his cause by releasing it to the public.

The deposition format, as opposed to a hearing, actually favored Smith. Dispensing with the normal five-minute rule of House hearings—under which members give speeches and struggle to put together coherent lines of questioning—each side had one hour of questioning at a time to engage in lengthy colloquies with Smith. Republicans used a shocking amount of that time to whine about Smith’s acquisition of telephone toll records of members of Congress. They used much of the rest to pick nits about picayune aspects of the circumstances of Smith’s appointment, his lack of respect for Trump’s busy schedule in requesting hearing dates, his refusal to allow Trump to review classified discovery in the comfort of Mar-a-Lago, and even the supposed allergy of big law firms to representing Trump or hiring Republican legislative staff.

Smith, meanwhile, gamely defended both the substance and the procedural aspects of his investigation and his prosecutions of the president. It was a quiet rout. And who exactly races to release video of his own ass kicking? And why?

I can think of only a few possible answers to this question.

The first is that Jordan doesn’t know he was routed. Perhaps he and I live in such different cognitive universes—fed by such different information environments—that he believes he landed punches on Smith. And perhaps, taking the point a step further, he is right.

Maybe there is some informational parallel universe from the one in which I live where Jordan and his staff showed conclusively that Smith is everything I believe, say, Lindsey Halligan to be—that he weaponized the criminal process by way of preventing the American people from reelecting Donald Trump, that he didn’t play fair, and that his appointment and conduct reflect a two-tiered system of justice. 

Normally, I would assume there is some truth to this theory. Americans do live in separate universes, informationally speaking, after all.

And yet I am genuinely bewildered by what testimony or line of questioning in what is more than 250 pages of transcript someone in this parallel universe might point to as evidence for this conclusion. What is the five-minute segment in which Smith admits anything of the remotest consequence? What is the section in which the Republican side catches him in error, shows some contradiction in his position, or finds evidence of a fib—even a trivial one?

Another possibility is that Jordan knows he was bested. Perhaps that is why he released the transcript quickly, on one of the least news-consuming days of the year, instead of letting it sit around during an election cycle while a campaign for its release mounts. Maybe it’s a lance the boil situation.

But this possibility, if it’s true, only raises the question of what Jordan expected. Is he so high on his own supply that he imagined Smith would collapse and melt before Republican staff counsel questions about telephone toll records requests that were perfectly legal under the law as it stood at the time? Did he imagine that Smith would not be conversant in major public filings his office made about, say, the conduct of the persons he indicted? Did he imagine Smith would be so intimidated by congressional questioning that he would come clean and quakingly admit to having been on a meritless crusade to get the former president for partisan political reasons unmoored from the traditions of honorable federal prosecution? 

And if he imagined any of these things, then why on Earth did he want to have the deposition in private anyway?

A third possibility is that the Republicans were just doing Trump’s bidding—harassing Smith—and that there’s really no strategy underlying any of it at all other than a long-shot effort to get Smith to make an unforced error. 

Still another possibility is that there is no Republican humiliation at this confrontation because the Republican media ecosystem just lies about what happened. Popular right-wing figures have spent the past couple days in aggressive spin mode, essentially treating the deposition as they would have liked it to happen, not as it actually did happen—and often just making things up along the way or offering tidbits taken grossly out of context. (See, for example, this and this and this.) Glenn Thrush of the New York Times notes that “cherry-picked leaks and previews were provided to MAGA influencers and Trump friendly media—so the GOP spin came out before other outlets had time to digest it hours before New Years Eve…”

So maybe it doesn’t matter what actually happened.

House Republicans do not appear to have issued any kind of statement explaining their thinking on the release—which suggests a certain degree of embarrassment. Ranking Member Jamie Raskin issued a statement triumphing over the deposition. But the majority? Other than a few tweets, silence. The most recent press release from the committee dates from Dec. 15. Nor can I find any statement from the chronically verbose Jordan himself. The man who is almost always yelling is not making a lot of noise right now. 

There’s one way to know for sure whether House Republicans are embarrassed by Smith’s performance before them—and that’s to see whether they have him back. 

Smith wrote two volumes of his final report. But only one of them is public—the one dealing with the Jan. 6 prosecution. The classified documents half of the report is under seal, and Smith can’t talk about any of it because of an injunction from Judge Aileen Cannon. That care on his part drove both sides a bit crazy in the first deposition—and clearly bothered Smith as well. But the injunction has a shelf life that may be coming to an end. 

What happens then? Will Jordan invite Smith back for Round 2?

Don’t hold your breath. That said, The Situation continues tomorrow.