Jack Smith tells GOP what it doesn’t want to hear about Trump

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Jack Smith tells House Republicans what they don’t want to hear about Trump

A GOP representative’s questioning about a gag order on Trump prompted answers that Republicans probably didn’t like. 

Jan. 22, 2026, 4:04 PM EST

By Jordan Rubin

There’s an old saying that a lawyer shouldn’t ask a question they don’t know the answer to. That wisdom usually arises on cross-examination, when a witness takes a lawyer into unknown territory. But it’s at least as true for questions that a lawyer prepares to ask ahead of time.

So it was strange, during Jack Smith’s congressional testimony on Thursday, when Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., asked Smith a seemingly prepared question about the gag order Smith got against Donald Trump in the federal election interference case. Cline, whose House bio says he previously worked as an attorney, asked the former special counsel: “In fact, there was no real-world harm that you could articulate [that] justified giving the federal government the power to silence him as a presidential candidate, was there?”

This was an odd question, because U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan had granted Smith’s motion to restrict statements targeting people involved in the proceedings. The judge wrote: “Undisputed testimony cited by the government demonstrates that when Defendant [Trump] has publicly attacked individuals, including on matters related to this case, those individuals are consequently threatened and harassed.” She added that the defense argument “that no limits may be placed on Defendant’s speech because he is engaged in a political campaign is untenable.”

When Smith pointed out to Cline that the prosecutor didn’t have to wait until someone was harmed to make such a motion, the Republican initially responded, “Actually,” before stumbling around for a bit and then ultimately settling on: “The gag order was restricted, correct?”

He was apparently referring to the fact that the appeals court upheld Chutkan’s order while also narrowing it. Yet Smith’s response shows that the narrowing doesn’t seem to help Cline’s attempted point. Smith stressed that the appeals court “absolutely agreed that there was a basis and that the threats to witnesses that came from the targeting by Donald Trump were real and that we had a duty to protect them.” He said Cline was “correct in that the court of appeals narrowed the order so the order covered witnesses, court staff, the judge and my staff. The difference was that it didn’t cover me anymore —which I was fine with.”

At this point, one might think that Cline would move on, because it’s unclear how it makes Smith look bad. Indeed, it mainly served as a platform to air the fact that multiple courts acknowledged Trump’s menacing behavior, while giving Smith the chance to make himself look selfless in the process.

But Cline continued down the peculiar path. He proceeded to ask Smith if he had proof that Trump’s statements had intimidated witnesses or prevented them from coming forward. Smith replied that he had evidence that Trump said, “If you come after me, I’m coming after you”; that Trump “suggested a witness should be put to death”; and that the courts “found that those sort of statements not only deter witnesses who’ve come forward, they deter witnesses who’ve yet to come forward.”

At this point, Cline must have surely moved on to another line of questioning or yielded back his time completely, rightOn the contrary. He tripled down, harping on whether Smith could identify anyone who didn’t come forward because of Trump’s threats.

Putting aside that it’s impossible to prove a negative, Cline’s question led Smith to reply: “It is not incumbent on a prosecutor to wait until someone gets killed before they move for an order to protect the proceedings.”

So there we have it. The natural progression of the politician’s chosen line of questioning led the witness to reiterate to the nation that there was reason for concern that words from the leader of the Republican Party could get people killed.

Thursday’s hearing reflected that the GOP didn’t have much to work with when it came to landing shots on Smith, but he probably didn’t mind that this was the sort of stuff they came up with on purpose."

Jack Smith tells GOP what it doesn’t want to hear about Trump

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Trump’s Trade Negotiator Says Response to Court Loss Would Be Immediate - The New York Times

Trump’s Trade Negotiator Says Response to Court Loss Would Be Immediate

"If the Supreme Court rules against its tariffs, the Trump administration would begin replacing them immediately, said Jamieson Greer, the United States Trade Representative.

Jan. 19, 2026

Jamieson Greer, the United States Trade Representative, on Air Force One in October.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

If the Supreme Court strikes down President Trump’s tariffs, the Trump administration plans to begin replacing them almost immediately with other levies, Jamieson Greer, the United States Trade Representative, said in an interview.

Mr. Greer, who is Mr. Trump’s top trade negotiator, said in a Jan. 15 interview with The New York Times that, following any adverse ruling, the administration would “start the next day” to reestablish tariffs “to respond to the problems the president has identified.”

Mr. Greer expressed optimism that the Supreme Court, which is currently reviewing the president’s use of an emergency law that underpins most of his tariffs, would rule in the administration’s favor. But Mr. Greer said that he and other advisers had given the president “a lot of different options” to achieve his trade goals at the beginning of the administration, meaning the president could turn to different legal authorities to impose similar tariffs worldwide.

“The reality is the president is going to have tariffs as part of his trade policy going forward,” Mr. Greer said.

The Supreme Court has been weighing the legality of the president’s use of a 1977 law, called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, to issue tariffs on trading partners globally over the past year. The court could rule in the coming weeks, potentially as soon as Tuesday, to revoke some or all of that authority.

Alternately, the court could decide to allow the president’s approach. In the last year, Mr. Trump has declared numerous international emergencies to swiftly raise and lower tariffs on trading partners for a variety of reasons. The president has imposed tariffs to reduce trade deficits, stop inflows of illegal drugs and address other international situations.

On Saturday, Mr. Trump outraged the European Union by threatening to impose tariffs on exports from seven European countries unless a deal is made to sell Greenland, a territory of Denmark, to the United States. Ted Murphy, an attorney at Sidley Austin, said in an emailed response that he believed that Mr. Trump would likely rely on IEEPA, the emergency law being reviewed by the courts, to impose those tariffs.

“I am not aware of any other trade statutes that would cover this situation (e.g., another nation refusing to sell the United States its sovereign territory),” Mr. Murphy wrote.

Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to justify the president’s use of the emergency law by saying tariffs were preferred to some sort of armed conflict over Greenland.

“The national emergency is avoiding a national emergency,” Mr. Bessent said, adding that the president was using “the economic might of the U.S. to avoid a hot war.”

Critics called the president’s threats of tariffs against Europe a brazen misuse of the emergency statute. And some legal experts said the president was making his own legal case harder by threatening such an outlandish use of the emergency law.

“Emergency powers are for emergencies,” Senator Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, said on Meet the Press. “There’s no emergency with Greenland. That’s ridiculous.”

Stephen Vladeck, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, said it was “not exactly a good look for the Trump administration, while trying to persuade the Supreme Court to endorse a novel and atextual interpretation of IEEPA” to threaten an even more novel use of the same statute.

“President Trump is doing no favors to his own legal arguments,” Mr. Vladeck added.

But even if the court does rule against Mr. Trump, it remains to be seen how much that would hamper the president’s ability to impose tariffs.

Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell University, said that an adverse ruling might force a change in the president’s tactics or tariff authorities, but that Mr. Trump seemed set on his pattern of aggressively using tariffs as a tool to advance his geopolitical ambitions.

“At this rate, it is unlikely that even a Supreme Court ruling will blunt his approach of using tariffs to go after other countries,” Mr. Prasad said.

The president can draw on other powerful tariff laws that allow him to impose import taxes on various products or countries’ exports. But those laws typically require either an investigation, a report to be prepared, or an economic or national security rationale, meaning Mr. Trump would have less flexibility to threaten tariffs at a whim. The president has also threatened tariffs on Canada for running TV ads critical of his trade approach, and put tariffs on Brazilian exports for its prosecution of former leader Jair Bolsonaro, a political ally of Mr. Trump.

In the interview, Mr. Greer said that Mr. Trump had other alternatives, like Section 301, which he used in his first term to impose tariffs on Chinese exports, and which had survived many legal challenges. The president could also impose tariffs using Section 232, a national security statute, Section 122, a legal authority that relates to balance of payments issues, or Section 338, which allows the United States to respond when another country uniquely discriminates against it, Mr. Greer said.

“Congress appropriately has delegated a lot of tariff authority to the President of the United States,” Mr. Greer said.

Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade."

Trump’s Trade Negotiator Says Response to Court Loss Would Be Immediate - The New York Times

Towns REJECT ICE as agency looks to place immigrant prisons throughout United States

Why filming ICE is so important after Renee Good's killing

Filming ICE is one of the most American things you can do right now — no matter what DOJ says

“More often than not, video is the only thing standing between a lie and a life being ruined by it.”Ben King / MS NOW; Octavio Jones / AFP via Getty Images

"An ICE agent shot Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026. He shot her in the head while she was inside her car. She was 37 years old, and a mother of three.

Those facts are fixed. Also fixed: the video footage from multiple cameras, including the ICE agent’s own cell phone camera, which quickly provided politicians, law enforcement and the public with multiple angles of the scene before, during and after the deadly encounter. Trump administration officials are demanding that the public accept that Good “weaponized” her vehicle, that the shooting was “self-defense” and that questioning this version of events endangers law enforcement. 

Although an FBI probe is ongoing, the Justice Department has already said it does not believe there is currently any basis to open a criminal civil rights investigation into Good’s killing. This is a deeply unsettling and exasperating moment for those of us who care about police accountability, truth and justice. We have been here before with the police killings of Eric Garner, Philando Castile and George Floyd — and the many lesser-known killings also caught on camera. We have seen clear video, watched it again and again, and still justice is delayed or never comes.

After all of this, it’s easy to conclude that filming doesn’t matter. I don’t believe that. I’ve seen what happens when video exists, and I’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t. More often than not, it feels like video is the only thing standing between a lie and a life being ruined by it. And the government seems to know it. Just a few days ago, a government lawyer in Minnesota federal court proposed the radical argument that observing police is not protected by the Constitution. 

Years ago, when I was a public defender in Brooklyn, I represented a man named Pedro Barbosa. There was no cell phone video in his case, and nothing that went viral. The footage that saved him came from a surveillance camera at a nearby gas station that we were lucky enough to find, and that luck made the difference between freedom and prison.

A police officer claimed Pedro tried to run him over with his car. He told a detailed story under oath that he had approached Pedro’s car to ask for license and registration and then Pedro had made eye contact and accelerated straight toward him, forcing the officer to make a last-second, heroic leap out of the path of the speeding car. Based on that testimony, Pedro was charged with a violent felony and faced up to 15 years in prison. He was detained before his trial on Rikers Island because he could not afford bail. 

I remember sitting across from Pedro in the interview cells behind the courtroom the day after his arrest. He was terrified but firm. None of it was true. He hadn’t tried to hit anyone. He pulled out of a parking spot and drove away — that was it. He kept asking the same question I had heard so many times before: “Who’s going to believe me over the police?”

Thankfully, an investigator from my office found surveillance footage from a nearby business. The video — far more distant and grainy than what we have seen in Minneapolis, but clear nonetheless —  showed the officer was never in danger. Pedro never accelerated toward him and the officer was to the side of the vehicle. The officer wasn’t afraid — he was angry at the gall of a man pulling away from him. He did not kill Pedro. But he did something that could have destroyed his life: he accused him of a violent felony that would have buried him in prison.

The question arose: Should I share this video with the prosecution? I had irrefutable evidence of police perjury that could set my client free, yet lawyers in my office were divided. We had all experienced the frustration of a prosecutor calling us back after seeing clear evidence of a police lie in paperwork or video, and offering an alternative reality of what they claimed they saw. An often-blind benefit of the doubt given to police despite what their eyes told them.  Maybe it was idealistic, but I couldn’t imagine anyone – even the office prosecuting my client – disagreeing with what I was plainly seeing here. 

I’m glad I shared the video that time. The prosecutor did not simply drop the charges. After seeing the video, he indicted the officer for perjury. The officer was ultimately convicted and sentenced.

That outcome was extraordinary — not because the evidence was unclear, but because accountability happened at all. It required video, investigative capacity, and a prosecutor willing to act on what the evidence showed. Without that footage, Pedro almost certainly would have gone to prison on a lie the system is primed to accept: a car as a weapon, an officer as the victim.

Pedro Barbosa’s case does not prove that the system works. Far from it. It proves something narrower: that when video exists, and when it is impossible to ignore, accountability becomes possible. 

Renée Nicole Good’s case may end this way. We do not yet know whether the truth so plainly visible will ultimately be accepted, acted on, or buried beneath official narratives and threats meant to silence dissent. Indeed, in an era of heightened political control over law enforcement priorities — underscored by the recent resignations of career federal prosecutors who protested the Trump Justice Department’s directive to pivot the Minneapolis ICE shooting inquiry toward the victim’s family rather than pursue a civil rights investigation — even the most compelling video evidence does not by itself guarantee accountability.

Yet that uncertainty is precisely why this moment demands not less video, but more.

In a world where misinformation spreads faster than facts, and where artificial intelligence is increasingly used to manufacture doubt, flooding the public sphere with real footage — captured by real people, in real time — is one of the most powerful ways to combat the lies our government amplifies to justify state violence and repression. I am sure that the Trump administration will continue to deny the cruelty of ICE aggression and mass deportations, but first-hand videos of this cruelty will make this denial more difficult, more costly, and more exposed. 

This is why I have spent years urging people to document ICE and police activity safely and lawfully. Why I helped create know-your-rights videos for immigrants and bystanders. Why I have said, over and over, that filming and documenting ICE and other law enforcement activities and arrests is the most American thing you can do. It is the pinnacle of First Amendment-protected action, no matter what the DOJ tries to tell us. And it is needed now more than ever. 

The violence isn’t abating, but escalating. The day after Renée Nicole was killed, Customs and Border Protection agents in Portland shot and wounded two people — again involving vehicles, just like every ICE shooting since September. Meanwhile, even other law-enforcement agencies seeking the truth have been shut out: Minnesota state police and prosecutors have said the FBI has taken sole control of the Good investigation and is refusing to share information, as the administration announces it will send hundreds more federal officers into the state.

What makes this moment especially dangerous is not just the killing, but the coordinated effort from the highest levels of power to condition the public to disbelieve what we can plainly see — and how eagerly many comply. The only answer is to continue to insist on the truth, and saturate the public sphere with it. We have the tools. Let’s use them even more."

Why filming ICE is so important after Renee Good's killing

Trump administration ends temporary protected status for Somalis in US | Trump administration | The Guardian

Trump administration ends temporary protected status for Somalis in US

"Critics condemn ‘bigoted attack’ as Trump bids to revoke citizenship of naturalized immigrants convicted of fraud

Joseph Gedeon

The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, speaks at a press conference in New York City on 8 January. Photograph: David Dee Delgado/Reuters

The Trump administration is terminating temporary protected status (TPS) for Somalisliving in the United States, giving hundreds of people two months to leave the country or face deportation.

The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said in a statement that conditions in the east African country had improved sufficiently and that Somalis no longer qualified for the designation under federal law.

“Temporary means temporary,” Noem wrote, adding that allowing Somali nationals to remain was “contrary to our national interests”.

“We are putting Americans first,” she added.

Then Donald Trump said his administration was going to revoke the US citizenship of any naturalized immigrant from Somalia or any other country who is convicted of defrauding what he referred to as “our citizens”.

The US president made the remarks in a wider speech at the Detroit Economic Club while on a trip to Michigan and did not go into further detail at the time. There is a high level of US citizenship by naturalization among Somali American communities in Minnesota.

The Trump administration had first announced its intention to end protection for Somali nationals in November, with Trump writing on his Truth Social platform about Minnesota, which is home to a large Somali community: “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER!”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair), which advocates for fair treatment of Muslims in the US, on Tuesday criticized the latest rollback of rights as a “bigoted attack” that will send some Somalis back to a war-torn, unstable nation.

“This decision does not reflect changed conditions in Somalia,” Cair said in a statement released jointly with its Minnesota chapter. “By dismantling protections for one of the most vulnerable Black and Muslim communities, this decision exposes an agenda rooted in exclusion, not public safety.”

The administration has used Minnesota’s issues with fraud as a pretext to send a surge of immigration officers into the state. Trump has called Somalis “garbage” and referenced unverified reports, amplified by Republican lawmakers, suggesting the militant group al-Shabaab in Somalia benefited from fraud committed in Minnesota, though these claims have not been substantiated.

On Monday, Minneapolis and St Paul filed a lawsuit against the administration, alleging Minnesota was being targeted for its diversity and political differences with the federal government. “[Department of Homeland Security] agents have sown chaos and terror across the metropolitan area,” said Keith Ellison, the state’s attorney general. Last week, the American citizen Renee Good was fatally shot in the head by a federal immigration agent in south Minneapolis during an enforcement operation, sparking tens of thousands to march in protest across the US.

The decision to withdraw TPS for Somalis in the US, first reported by Fox News Digital, affects 705 Somali nationals currently holding TPS, according to official US Citizenship and Immigration Services data as of August 2025. They have until 17 March before their status expires. Anonymous immigration sources cited higher figures to Fox News of about 2,471 current beneficiaries and another 1,383 applications.

TPS is granted by the Department of Homeland Security to foreign nationals who cannot safely return to their home countries due to armed conflict, natural disasters or other extraordinary circumstances. The protection allows individuals to live and work legally in the US until conditions improve in their homeland.

Somalis were first granted TPS by the administration of George HW Bush in 1991 during Somalia’s civil war. The status has been repeatedly renewed by successive administrations, most recently by Joe Biden in September 2024, who extended it through March 2026.

Somalia remains plagued by persistent violence from al-Shabaab militants, severe drought conditions and widespread humanitarian crises that have displaced millions of people internally, according to UN reports. Human rights organizations have warned that returning Somali nationals to the country could place them at severe risk.

The Congressional Research Service last spring said the Somali TPS population was 705 out of nearly 1.3 million TPS immigrants in the US. Trump has ended protections across multiple countries in his second presidency as part of his crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration in the US.

Somalia is one of the world’s poorest countries and has for decades been beset by chronic strife exacerbated by multiple natural disasters, including severe droughts. The al-Qaida affiliate al-Shabaab controls parts of the country and has carried out truck bombings and other assaults in the capital, Mogadishu, in recent years that killed dozens of people.

Congress established the temporary protected status program in 1990 to help foreign nationals fleeing unstable, threatening conditions in their home countries and are living in the US. It allows the executive branch to designate a country, generally in 18-month increments, for the protected status.

Approved recipients can legally work and are protected from deportation but there is no pathway to a green card or US citizenship and they are reliant on the government renewing the TPS designation every few years.

It was not immediately clear how quickly those Somalis covered by TPS could be removed from the country once their protections expire. Most attempts by the administration to end a TPS designation have ended up in the courts.

Reuters contributed reporting"

Trump administration ends temporary protected status for Somalis in US | Trump administration | The Guardian

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Opinion | What the ‘Dude’ Who Shot Renee Good Couldn’t Hear - The New York Times

What the ‘Dude’ Who Shot Renee Good Couldn’t Hear

Jan. 18, 2026

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

"I know that dude.

That dude is every contractor who’s ever come into my house. That dude is every first date, every mechanic, every guy walking behind me in the dark. When Renee Good said, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad,” I heard her addressing every man who would or could or might take advantage of us as women.

That “dude” was a peace offering, a reaching out to show we’re not like those other women, the kind who don’t know about cars or home repairs. We’re not weak or uncool. We’re not hysterical or overly emotional. We’re not into drama. No. We’re just like you, dude.

That “dude” is our signal. Our call for mercy.

That “dude” is a please and thank you. Resistance to an unwanted hug. An unwanted anything.

That “dude” is our negotiation for a world that threatens us.

Did the ICE agent kill Ms. Good because he feared her? Or did he kill her because she didn’t fear him?

The man, with his face covering, his tactical vest, his handgun and his shorn hair, was kitted up to playact in a war against unarmed everybodies. He was frailty wrapped in fatigues.

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In the days since Ms. Good was killed, more agents have been caught on camera asking residents questions like “Have y’all not learned from the past couple of days?”

“Learned what?” asks a woman. “What’s our lesson here?”

“Following federal agents,” an agent says, and then lunges for her phone and snatches it out of her hands. It seems he has no words to explain what, exactly, he is doing and why.

Is fascism our lesson? Is male supremacy our lesson? Hatred? Cowardice? That some citizens are more equal than other citizens? That some of us no longer have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? That the First Amendment turns out to be as fragile as rice paper? When there is no moral justification, the only tool that remains is to attack.

The violence just seems to expand, as violence so often does. Daily, now, there are videos of tear gas and physical aggression from the foot soldiers of ICE. I watched another video of a woman trying to tell the men who are dragging her, face down, through the street that she has a brain injury and was on her way to a medical appointment. She is detained by federal agents and forced into their car, for what we do not know. Think back to April, when one of the first broken car windows in an ICE arrest made national news. It was in a town in Massachusetts. A couple sat calmly in the car, on the phone with their immigration lawyer. Think how normal it’s become now to see ICE agents shattering car windows.

I wonder why they so often choose escalation over de-escalation. I wonder if they know how those who perpetrate violence can come to be haunted by their past actions, even if that violence is mandated by the state. Recently, I watched a documentary called “In Waves and War” that premiered at Telluride. The film follows three former Navy SEALs with severe PTSD. It is a moving examination of what it means to live in the aftermath of war, of the unbearable moral weight of what these men did and saw and endured. Each new generation, it seems, must relearn how difficult it is to find peace after war.

The three men are racked by trauma. One wife says she could look into her husband’s eyes and see that he was simply not there. The men go to Mexico and use psychedelic drugs to treat their PTSD. They expected, while on the drugs, to see images from the battles they’d faced as Navy SEALs, the battles in which they’d lost friends and been injured and nearly lost their own lives.

But instead, says a man named DJ, what comes are visions from childhood of his father’s rage and violence and humiliations. How terrified he was of his dad. And how he learned to mirror that rage and violence toward his own children.

“If we didn’t abuse children,” a veteran asks in the film, “would we have a military?”

These men release their trauma at least in part through their own wrecked and cathartic sobbing. How rare, I think, to see a grown man drowning and then healing something in himself through anguished tears. Rare and beautiful, because he is finally engaged in the full range of what it means to be human.

I do not know the ICE agent who shot Ms. Good, but I know the impulse for violence tends to come from the experience of pain. If this applies to Ms. Good’s killer, I hope he can find his way out of that pain someday, not because he deserves it or because I want to absolve him, but because no good comes to a world that gets in the way of men like him.

That ICE agent may not have known what Renee Good’s “dude” meant. Someday he may learn. In the meantime, I hope that word is an auditory purgatory, a looped soundtrack — dude, dude, dude — that’s as difficult to escape as a bullet."

Opinion | What the ‘Dude’ Who Shot Renee Good Couldn’t Hear - The New York Times