President says he will ‘never stifle’ AI development while unveiling sweeping tool to access federal government sites
Donald Trump is now speaking at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington DC, where he is unveiling a new AI tool to make it easier to access federal government information.
“They’re always saying it’s too complicated, too complicated. It’s not complicated any more,” the president said.
He also used his time at the podium to make his views on the development of artificial intelligence clear. A reminder that Trump has branded the calls for greater guardrails a “hoax”.
“This is one more example of why I will never stifle the growth of technology that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution,” the president said today. “We can’t stifle it.”
Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat, asked Smith about his work with Republicans throughout his investigation into Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
The former special prosecutor said he found it “very hard” to understand why his probe was considered to be partisan when the “strongest witnesses” were Republicans like Rusty Bowers, a former Arizona state representative, and former vice-president Mike Pence.
“The criminal scheme we investigated was predicated upon Donald Trump preying on party loyalty. He preyed on party loyalty and fear,” Smith said. “The reality is, one of the reasons, our democracy held up. One of the reasons he was not able to take power, even though, he was seeking to do these things is because Republicans stood up.”
Jack Smith’s presence at a February 2024 basketball game briefly became a point of argument between Democrat Amy Klobuchar and Republican Eric Schmitt.
Schmitt accused Smith of attending an Atlanta Hawks v Golden State Warriors game in Atlanta, insinuating he was in the area when prosecutor Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis revealed she had a relationship with prosecutor Nathan Wade. Smith denied he was in Atlanta.
But Smith later said he attended an Iowa Hawkeyes v. Maryland Terrapins game in February 2024 to watch Caitlin Clark.
“You have your teams wrong,” Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar told Schmitt after Smith clarified.
“I would just say, for a US senator to have false information, and imply, based on confusion about the name of a team – which I knew, knowing my Midwestern sports – and imply that you were in another city, that you were somehow involved that day in what was happening in Georgia, and then call you a ‘dirtbag’ is something that deserves an apology,” Klobuchar said.
Republican senator Eric Schmitt used his time questioning to attack Jack Smith, accusing Smith of potentially committing perjury for denying that he attended a basketball game in Atlanta in February 2024.
Smith said he did not recall attending a basketball game in Atlanta between the Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks on 3 February 2024. But Schmitt said he had obtained text messages between Smith’s staff that indicated he had attended the game.
“I think you’ve already perjured yourself,” Schmitt told Smith.
Schmitt aggressively questioned Smith about whether he violated the DoJ’s Public Integrity Section recommendation by filing a superseeding indictment against president Donald Trump.
At one point, Schmitt asked Smith why he was writing down notes during the hearing. Though, he retracted his question.
Schmitt ended his testimony by telling Smith he was “not a hero” and that he would “go down as a total dirtbag”.
In a testy exchange with Republican senator John Kennedy of Lousiana, Smith fended off an accusation that the former attorney general Merrick Garland consulted with Joe Biden after Smith informed Garland, twice, that he was going to prosecute Trump.
“I have no idea what he did. My job as a prosecutor … was to make an independent decision. And attorney general Garland could have countermanded that decision,” Smith said.
The former special counsel repeated that he obtained call toll records, not phone records, as part of his investigation, and pushed back on Kennedy accusing him of breaking the Speech and Debate Clause of the US constitution.
In closing, Kennedy slammed Smith: “You make me want to throw up in my mouth.” However, the former prosecutor appeared unfazed and did not respond.
As is the case with most of Trump’s public appearances at the moment – now just 35 days until the midterm elections – he repeated his claim that the war with Iran will be over “very soon”. This despite another week of stalled negotiations between Washington and Tehran via mediators.
“They’re failing very badly,” the president said. “They will not have a nuclear weapon. And oil prices are going to be tumbling down, just like they were before.”
He again referred to the conflict as a “little excursion”. A reminder the war is now in its seventh month, and has caused a global energy crisis that has seen the average price of a gallon of gas increase by a dollar.
“I think in the years to come, they’ll be writing books and they’ll be writing the history of our country, and they’ll say that’s one of the most important things that we did,” Trump said.
Donald Trump is now speaking at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington DC, where he is unveiling a new AI tool to make it easier to access federal government information.
“They’re always saying it’s too complicated, too complicated. It’s not complicated any more,” the president said.
He also used his time at the podium to make his views on the development of artificial intelligence clear. A reminder that Trump has branded the calls for greater guardrails a “hoax”.
“This is one more example of why I will never stifle the growth of technology that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution,” the president said today. “We can’t stifle it.”
In a back and forth with Durbin, the former special counsel set out exactly what call toll records are – as I set out earlier.
“My office did secure toll records from third parties, third-party telephone companies, in the course of our investigation that were records for members of Congress,” Smith confirmed, and said they “were materially relevant to our investigation”.
Smith said that these records corroborated evidence that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators were seeking to “exploit the violence on January 6 in furtherance of their criminal scheme. They were taking the fact that law enforcement officers had been brutally assaulted at this institution, and using that to seek to delay the proceedings further in violation of the law.”
The former special counsel explained why these records proved useful, despite the fact they didn’t contain any content. For example it allowed investigators to determine how many phones former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump campaign official at the time, had and used to make calls.
Smith noted, in response to questions from Chuck Grassley, that when he first became special counsel, he did not have a government phone or government computer.
“In the initial days when I was appointed and I was still living in the Netherlands, I did use a personal device and email to communicate with folks in the justice department,” Smith said. “What I did when I got government accounts is made sure, to the best of my ability, that information was forwarded to government accounts, so it would be within the Federal Records Act. I sought at all times to comply with the Federal Records Act, as I expected my attorneys to do as well.”
During his opening remarks, Smith stood by his investigations and his findings, and also noted that his work – and that of his colleagues – is “often weakened by attacks” from lawmakers and officials.
He noted the effort from the Trump administration to vilify career prosecutors and FBI agents “simply because of their unwavering commitment to the fair and impartial administration of justice without regard for any personal costs”.
“I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States,” Smith added.
The former special counsel noted that he would be unable to discuss the contents of his second volume of his report – which focuses on Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. This comes as a result of a federal judge’s order, that I mentioned earlier, which bars the release of the specific report.
Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the judiciary committee, said that his Republican colleagues have “spent months spreading baseless conspiracy theories” about Jack Smith’s investigations “instead of hearing from him directly”.
Durbin has long advocated for the former special counsel to defend his work, despite GOP lawmakers on the panel refusing to invite him to Capitol Hill.
“President Trump’s misconduct was egregious, differing in kind and scale from what we had seen by any president before him,” Durbin said. “Investigating misconduct by government officials requires scrupulous care. Thankfully, Mr Smith, who is here today and will be under oath, and his team of nonpartisan career prosecutors had the necessary experience to tackle this assignment.”
Durbin went on to accuse the president and many congressional Republicans of attempting to smear Smith and manufacture conspiracies about his team in order “to whitewash the history of the 2020 election, and the January 6 insidious attack on this Capitol building”.
“They decry Mr Smith for following the facts of the law and say nothing, nothing about a president who continued to break the law in an effort to prevent the truth from coming to light,” Durbin added.
Chuck Grassley – the Republican chair of the Senate judiciary committee – is delivering his opening remarks now.
The senator from Iowa alleges that while Smith has claimed his focus was on the January 6 Capitol riots, the former special counsel’s “own conduct contradicts that assertion”.
“When his team subpoenaed records, sometimes the date ranges extended weeks, months, or years before and after January 6,” Grassley said, adding that Smith subpoenaed and obtained information on Republican groups as early as 2019 and as late as 2023.
“You see, that’s what you must do if your case is designed to map out and target the entire Republican Party,” Grassley added.
It’s worth noting that when it comes to the investigation into Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, Smith legally obtained phone toll records – which were obtained through a grand jury. These records show the date, time, and duration of calls, but not the actual content of the communications.
These are often secured by prosecutors in connection with investigations.
Originally reported by Guardian US Politics.