WATCH: Sen. Schiff Calls Out GOP Attacks on Jack Smith, Refusal to Acknowledge Trump’s Conspiracies on MS NOW’s All In with Chris Hayes

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined MS NOW’s All In with Chris Hayes and called out Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans’ repeated attacks on Jack Smith, the former special counsel who led investigations into the events of January 6, 2021, and the case involving classified documents being stored at President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Schiff exposed Republicans’ refusal to acknowledge President Trump’s conspiracies relating to January 6 and Mar-a-Lago investigations during a Senate Judiciary hearing earlier today with Jack Smith. He also denounced Republicans for ignoring the Trump administration’s attempted indictments against Democratic Members of Congress. At the hearing earlier today, Schiff pledged to make a motion to subpoena Volume II of Jack Smith’s report at the committee’s next meeting. View the full interview here. Key Excerpts: On Republican’s attacks on Jack Smith’s investigations, Sen. Schmitt’s exchange: They teach you in law school not to ask a question you don’t know the answer to when you’re cross-examining someone. I don’t always agree with that philosophy. Sometimes you have to take a risk and ask a question you don’t know the answer to, but you generally don’t want to accuse someone of perjury and call them a dirtbag if you don’t know your facts. That’s pretty basic, and the point where I knew they made a colossal screw up was after Schmitt had gone through his “You’re a dirtbag and you’re clearly concealing and boy have we got you you’re in trouble for perjury.” Right after that, I was sitting at the end of the dais because I’m the junior member, so therefore I was closest to Jack Smith, and he must have been given a copy of that poster board, so he actually got to look at it for the first time. And he turned to me, I think, because I was closest, and mouthed, “I can explain. I think I can explain this.” So, it wasn’t my turn, but I piped up anyway. Can we give the chance, give this witness a chance to explain now that he’s seen the document? And Amy Klobuchar took it from there, and she did a masterful job. And just watching that footage now of him at that game in Maryland is the icing on the cake. But I think it did something really important. You know, aside from the impact on Eric Schmitt, it showed just how over the top, and ill-considered, and ill-thought-out all of these heinous attacks of Jack Smith have been. The others may not have blown up as spectacularly, but they’re equally meritless. This is a class act, a dedicated prosecutor, and what I found so interesting also through all of this is the Republicans have never contested the overwhelming evidence of Trump’s guilt on both of those charges, Mar-a-Lago and January 6th, because they can’t. Smith has made it clear he had proof beyond a reasonable doubt. We certainly saw a lot of that evidence in the January 6 hearings. They don’t contest any of it because they can’t. They want to attack Smith instead, and we saw that spectacularly blow up in their face today. On refusing to call out President Trump’s conspiracy theories: […] And this is not the first time we’ve had a hearing of this nature. That is a hearing to try to discredit Smith’s investigation of Mar-a-Lago on January 6. We’ve had multiple hearings now. They never contest the facts of the president’s guilt. They don’t try to claim, oh, the president never pressured Georgia to find 11,780 votes that don’t exist because there’s a recording of him doing it. They don’t contest Trump telling his own Justice Department at the time when they rebutted all these false claims of fraud that Trump tells Justice just say the elections were corrupt and let the Republican congressmen do the rest. They don’t contest that. They don’t contest all the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. They don’t contest his trying to hide that evidence. They don’t contest his trying to do away with the security footage while they’re trying to hide those boxes. They don’t contest any of that because they can’t. Instead, they vilify Jack Smith. They basically leak documents from the Justice Department, and the chairman calls it a whistleblower. But it’s just DOJ leaking documents before every hearing so that they can try to pretend they’re significant and take attention away from the facts. On Republicans’ not calling out Trump’s attempted indictments against Democratic Members of Congress: […] And here they are, protesting with such indignation that Jack Smith sought these toll records, not the contents of calls, but the toll records, not because they were targets of an investigation, but because co-conspirators like Rudy Giuliani and the president were calling them as January 6 was going on. They take great umbrage at all of that, but their colleagues are the subject of a grand jury investigation, the Justice Department sought to indict them very much right in the target bullseye, and the grand jury says no, that’s total BS. Not a single grand juror goes along with the prosecutors, and these Republicans on the Judiciary Committee don’t say boo about it. They could care less about it. I mean, it is staggering. Can you imagine if there was an effort to indict one of them and a grand jury turned them down, the prosecutors down completely? What kind of hue and cry there would be? But this just shows the horrendous double standard. ###