Former special counsel Jack Smith, who supervised two prosecutions of President Donald Trump over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and retention of classified documents, defended his work before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.

The hearing, which became heated at times and included an extended tangent about basketball, came after months of accusations from Republicans that Smith weaponized the Justice Department on behalf of the Biden administration. Denying any partisan loyalty, Smith said he’s not a politician and never received pressure to influence his decisions.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” Smith said.

Some Republicans lobbed personal insults. “You will go down as a total dirtbag,” said Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., who created confusion in the room with his line of questioning about Smith’s attendance at a basketball game.

Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith as special counsel days after Trump announced his reelection campaign in 2022 and had him take over two existing grand jury probes into Trump’s actions.

One focused on Trump’s involvement in the push to overturn his loss in the 2020 election, including efforts to have states stop counting votes, present false electors to Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, and spur the attack on the Capitol itself.

The second covered allegations Trump took hundreds of classified documents with him to his private Mar-a-Lago club and stored some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets in publicly accessible areas.

Both cases were dropped after Trump won reelection due to a policy that sitting presidents cannot face federal charges.

Republicans on the panel repeatedly accused Smith of political bias and wrongdoing. Grassley argued that the American public should be “outraged” over the sweeping records that Smith obtained about congressional Republicans, Republican officials and even donors.

“The Smith election case ultimately wasn’t just about Trump. It was about partisan agents and prosecutors mapping out a partisan apparatus,” Grassley said.

They also tried to pin him down on the details of his probes. According to the FBI’s own files, Grassley said, officials thought they did not have probable cause to search Mar-a-Lago for documents. Those documents, however, predate information presented in court that alleged Trump took steps to hide documents from investigators.

At one point, Schmitt pressed Smith on why his team ignored advice from the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section on filing a second indictment in the election case against Trump within 60 days of Election Day. Pushing back, Smith said the section, commonly known as PIN, initially rejected a first draft of a second indictment before approving a later draft.

Hawks or Hawkeyes?

Perhaps the most memorable exchange came as Schmitt accused Smith of denying that he was in Atlanta a day after a state prosecutor also investigating Trump admitted to having an affair. Schmitt said he had copies of texts between Smith’s staff members stating he was at an Atlanta Hawks game, and Schmitt later suggested that Smith perjured himself.

Smith said he was actually at a University of Maryland women’s basketball game against the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, where Caitlin Clark was playing. Smith noted the DOJ would have records of his attendance.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said Schmitt went too far.

“I think people should get their facts straight before you accuse someone of being a dirtbag,” Klobuchar said. “You got the teams wrong, sir.”

Schmitt’s office did not respond to a request for the messages.

Smith also defended obtaining phone records of members of Congress, saying they helped show that Trump sought to use the chaos of the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, to further delay the certification of his loss. Smith said the records showed the time of the call, its length and its participants, but they did not contain any content.

“Those records corroborated evidence that we had that the president, President Donald Trump, and his co-conspirators were seeking to leverage violence on January 6th,” Smith said.

According to Smith, he sought gag orders to prevent the disclosure of the subpoenas for those records to protect the probe from possible interference by Trump. Smith pointed out that Trump publicly threatened one witness, retired Gen. Mark Milley, by saying he should face the death penalty.

Ranking member Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., argued that Republicans ignored evidence that Trump had taken steps to overturn the 2020 election, including Trump’s recorded phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when he exhorted Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn the state’s result.

“In both his theft and distribution of these classified documents, and his attempts to steal the 2020 election, President Trump demonstrated a complete disdain for the laws of the United States, the will of the people and our national security,” Durbin said.