“Am I Donald Trump?” asked Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

“You are not, sir,” replied Hatchet Jack Smith during yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

It seems a silly question, but it got to the heart of one of Smith’s most egregious acts during his years-long fishing expedition against Donald Trump — namely, his secretive subpoenaing and scooping up of the phone records of a bunch of Trump-friendly Republican senators, and his slapping of a nondisclosure order on the phone companies in order to keep them from telling the senators that they were being spied on.

What prompted Cruz’s question? Smith said he’d done it because he had “strong reason to believe that Donald Trump would destroy evidence.”

If an unconstitutional Democrat-appointed prosecutor can invade the privacy of sitting senators, just imagine what he can do to Joe Sixpacks like us. Oh, wait.

Cruz wasn’t done. “Is it a crime to be a Republican?” he asked. “Is it a crime to write a check to Republicans?”

What Cruz was getting at was Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley’s revelation that Smith had “obtained checks from at least 4,782 Americans as part of his ‘Arctic Frost’ investigation, giving the Biden administration access to these individuals’ bank accounts and routing numbers.”

Going forward, if any American pauses before sending a donation to a conservative cause or a Republican politician, well, mission accomplished.

Missouri Republican Josh Hawley also pressed Smith on his decision to pursue those senatorial phone records. But he also called out Smith’s contention that he’s never been a partisan, that politics had nothing to do with his investigation.

“Mr. Smith,” Hawley began, “I have to start by saying I think that maybe I underestimated you. I underestimated, in particular, your comedic talent. I’ve been watching this whole hearing. I’ve watched everything you said. I noticed that you began by saying, ‘I have no partisan loyalty,’ and you repeated over and over and over, there’s nothing in your investigation about politics. That’s hilarious.”

Hawley continued, “In fact, your investigation was all about politics from day one. Your investigation, so-called, your prosecution, so-called, was nothing other than an attempt to interfere politically in a presidential election in the United States of America.”

If only Hawley’s Missouri colleague, Eric Schmitt, had done his homework. Schmitt made something of an own goal when he suggested that Smith had been in Atlanta to meet with Fulton County DA Fani Willis, there to comingle a federal investigation of Trump with a state investigation of him. And Schmitt thought he’d caught Smith in a perjury trap, putting him at an Atlanta Hawks basketball game when in fact he was at an Iowa Hawkeyes basketball game in Maryland.

“I’m going to begin my questions now,” said an indignant Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar. “But I think that people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag and not get the teams wrong.”

If I might: A dog can have ticks and fleas — which is to say that just because Schmitt whiffed doesn’t mean Smith isn’t a dirtbag. He is. For many other encroachments.

Sadly, Smith won’t ever be perp walked, won’t ever see the inside of a prison cell, won’t ever be made to feel what it’s like to be on the other end of one of his vicious and deeply unscrupulous investigations, and that’s a shame. If Anthony Fauci wants us to believe that he is The Science, then Jack Smith similarly wants us to believe that he is The Law.

But he isn’t. He’s The Lawfare. Indeed, if one good thing can come out of these hearings, let it be that Jack Smith’s name becomes synonymous with lawfare, with the Democrats’ use of the law to punish their political opponents.

Folksy, Rhodes-Scholarly Louisiana Republican John Kennedy, who told Smith that he made him want to throw up in his mouth, noted during his time that Smith’s wife happened to be a big supporter of both the Bidens and the Obamas. Not surprisingly, Smith didn’t want to talk about that.

In a post-hearing interview on Fox News, Kennedy cut right to the chase and summed up the whole sorry affair. Said Kennedy, “I think I know what went on. I think Joe Biden was president, he was worried about Donald Trump running against him, he picked up the phone and called his attorney general, [Merrick] Garland, and said, ‘You need to prosecute Trump. It’ll hurt him politically.’ And Garland didn’t want to do it himself, so he found a hack to do it, and that hack happens to be Jack Smith. And that’s what they did, and it backfired on them.”

And that, folks, is what this whole Jack Smith story has been about from the jump: an effort to get Donald Trump at all costs.