From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarrow. This is the Daily.

On Thursday, three years after his appointment as special counsel, Jack Smith finally delivered the legal argument against President Trump that he was never allowed to make in court. Today, what Smith told Congress and why his message is likely to make him Trump's next target for prosecution.

It's Friday, January 23rd.

Glenn, can you just describe exactly where you are? It's somewhere in the capital complex.

Yes, I am in the Byzantine maze of the United States Capitol, and I've just come out of the

hearing room where Jack Smith spent approximately four, four and a half hours being grilled by the House Judiciary Committee.

Thank you for sticking around after the hearing to talk to us. We appreciate it.

I want to begin with the context for this hearing, the backstory behind why we're finally hearing from Jack Smith, a special counsel who

ended up overseeing these two sprawling criminal investigations into President Trump in between

his first and second term.

And it just seems worth saying this is a prosecutor on whose shoulders, in a lot of ways,

rested the very question of whether Trump could ever be president again or might he have ended

up in prison.

I mean, he's just so central to the entire story of the Trump era in a lot of ways.

Look, for about a year, late 2022 to late 2023,

Jack Smith was arguably one of the most important figures in the country.

And his road to this committee room was a pretty torturous path.

In late 2022, just to refresh people's memories,

Merrick Garland, then the Attorney General, is really in a corner.

He can't personally investigate all the allegations against Donald Trump because he was appointed by Trump's political adversary, Joe Biden.

Right, like a classic conflict of interest.

Right. So he appoints Jack Smith, who at this point was serving as a war crimes prosecutor in the Hague to take over the two investigations into Donald Trump, one of which

...