Senate Republicans call Jack Smith's evidence-based prosecution abuse, demand the same standard for Hunter Biden and Trump Jr.

…(cont) In his opening statement, Smith told the committee it was the evidence tied to Trump's own actions that made him bring the charges. Not a hunch. The evidence. That's what he said, under oath, in a hearing the committee had already titled "Abuse of Authority" before he ever sat down.

Back in November of 2024, a federal judge named Tanya Chutkan dismissed both of Smith's cases — the documents case, and the one over the 2020 election — a few weeks after Trump won that November's election. Dismissed. The committee held Tuesday's hearing anyway, almost two years later, to ask the man who built those cases what he thought he was doing.

I wrote something else down, from a week before the hearing, the twenty-second of September. A senator on that same committee asked for subpoenas — one for Donald Trump Jr., one for Hunter Biden — over a wedding party a Russian oligarch reportedly paid for. The senator wants to know whether either man cashed in on being close to the White House. That's an evidence question. It's the same kind of question Smith says he was answering when he brought the Trump charges in the first place.

Down at the corner store, the guy behind the register keeps a running tab for the families he's known twenty years. A stranger walks in wanting the same tab, he cards them, rings it up twice, asks for cash on the counter first. I've stood there with the dog on the leash waiting on a biscuit and watched him do exactly that to two different people ten minutes apart. I'm not accusing him of anything — everybody needs a system. I'm asking whether a committee that says it runs on evidence keeps the same kind of book he does, one for the names it already likes and another for everybody else.

Does the word "abuse" mean something different when the evidence points at a Trump than when it points at a Trump Jr. or a Hunter Biden? Is a subpoena over a wedding party the kind of thing the hearing title says it's worried about, or is that oversight? A judge already dismissed the cases the committee spent Tuesday re-litigating — so what is left in them that a court hasn't already closed?

Oh — hold on, before you go. One more thing, since I've still got the committee's own words right here in the notebook. There's a word in that title I haven't been able to shake since Tuesday. Is that the right word for what happened to Smith's two cases? Or is it the right word for what the committee's own member is now asking the Justice Department to do to Trump Jr. and Hunter Biden? Because holding somebody to the evidence only has the one name, near as I can tell, and the committee already printed it on the door: targeting.