Former special counsel Jack Smith repeatedly sidestepped pointed questions about the credibility of January 6 committee witness Cassidy Hutchinson, despite previously acknowledging her most explosive claims amounted to secondhand hearsay.
The issue surfaced during an exchange with House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) during Smith’s nearly five hours of public testimony. Jordan pressed Smith over the former White House assistant’s prime-time testimony before the Democrat-led Jan. 6 committee, alleging President Donald Trump lunged for the steering wheel of his Secret Service vehicle on Jan. 6, 2021.
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This is a pretty masterful 5 minutes from Rep. Jim Jordan.
He uses disgraced and discredited testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson to demonstrate how the truth simply didn’t matter to Jack Smith and the J6 Committee.
They wanted to GET TRUMP at all costs. pic.twitter.com/5IBjqxKZAE
— Andrew Kolvet (@AndrewKolvet) January 22, 2026
“Do you think she was lying?” Jordan asked, referring to Hutchinson’s account, which became one of the most widely-circulated moments of the Democrat-led January 6 select committee hearings.
Smith responded by reiterating what he had previously stated in a closed-door deposition, that Hutchinson did not witness the alleged incident firsthand.
“My recollection of her testimony about that is that it was secondhand,” Smith said, noting she claimed to have heard the story from someone else.
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Jordan followed up by naming two firsthand witnesses — former White House deputy chief of staff for operations Tony Ornato and Secret Service agent Bobby Engel — both of whom publicly denied the incident occurred. Jordan asked Smith directly whether his team ever confirmed Hutchinson’s version of events.
Smith acknowledged that prosecutors interviewed another witness who was in the vehicle and “did not confirm that that happened,” but declined to give a yes-or-no answer on whether the claim had been substantiated.
The exchange grew sharper when Jordan cited Smith’s own December deposition testimony, in which the former special counsel said Hutchinson’s allegations would likely be inadmissible at trial because they were hearsay. Smith confirmed under questioning that he had said a defense attorney would seek to preclude her testimony on that basis.
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Jordan also referenced reporting by Washington Post journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis, who wrote that Smith ultimately agreed with prosecutors on his team that Hutchinson would be a weak trial witness after Trump administration officials uniformly disputed her claims under oath. Smith responded that he had made no “final determinations” about potential witnesses.
The hearing underscored a central Republican critique of the Jan. 6 investigation led by Democrats in 2022: that they elevated dramatic but unverified testimony in a made-for-television setting while prosecutors privately questioned the credibility of witness claims.
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Hutchinson’s steering-wheel allegation was cited 185 times in the select committee’s final report, despite denials from firsthand witnesses and Smith’s own acknowledgment that it was second-hand information that he deemed “hearsay” during his deposition.
Smith repeatedly emphasized that his office conducted an independent investigation, but his refusal to acknowledge Hutchinson’s credibility problem directly left GOP lawmakers arguing that the episode revealed the partisan nature of Smith’s investigations.
