To take the Fifth or to testify? That was the question facing disgraced former special prosecutor Jack Smith. Either way, he was in a tough spot.

If he chose the former, as so many of his underlings had already done, he’d lend support to the suggestion that he’s a coward and a zealot. But if he chose the latter, he’d remove all doubt.

Jack Smith did indeed testify yesterday, for nearly five hours before the House Judiciary Committee, and he lived down to all my expectations. “I will not be intimidated,” he harrumphed.

Smith, of course, is the unconstitutional former special counsel whom Joe Biden’s embittered hatchet man of an attorney general, Merrick Garland, handpicked to persecute Donald Trump for having had the audacity to question the results of the rigged 2020 election — you remember, the one in which basement-bound Biden got more population-adjusted votes than rock-star Barack Obama got in 2008. As Smith put it, Trump “sought to prey” on his supporters, “looked for ways to stay in power,” and was responsible for the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. That was the day when Trump stood on the Ellipse just south of the White House and said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

So desperate was Smith to get Trump that he slapped a gag order on him, dispatched the FBI to barge into the former and future president’s Mar-a-Lago estate and start sniffing around in the first lady’s underwear drawer, and put together a Nixonian enemies list of Trump-supporting Republican lawmakers and snatched up their phone records while ordering the phone carriers not to alert the victims of Smith’s spying.

“It was always about politics,” said House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan. “The good news is, the American people saw through it.” They certainly did see through this and other forms of Democrat lawfare, and they rejected it at the ballot box by resoundingly returning Donald Trump to the White House.

There were many compelling moments from yesterday’s events. Perhaps my favorite was how the cat got Smith’s tongue during California Republican Kevin Kiley’s questioning. Kiley brought up an assessment by constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley that Smith had overstepped his constitutional bounds, and Smith responded by saying that he disagreed with Turley’s characterization. Then Kiley brought up the 9-0 Supreme Court ruling in which the justices unanimously struck down Smith’s tactics in securing a corruption conviction against former Republican Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, and asked him if he also disagreed with justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Silence.

It was leftist lawfare on the hot seat, and California Congressman Darrell Issa made sure everyone knew it. In front of a large backdrop titled “Biden DOJ Enemies List,” which included the pro-Trump Republicans whom Smith had spied on, Issa charged: “You, like the president’s men for Richard Nixon, went after your political enemies. … They’re not your political enemies, but they sure as hell were Joe Biden’s political enemies, weren’t they? They were [Kamala] Harris’s political enemies. They were the enemies of the president, and you were their arm.”

Issa ended his interrogation of Smith with these words: “And with that, I yield back in disgust of this witness.”

For the Trump haters, there was Democrat ranking member Jamie Raskin, who extolled Smith’s imaginary virtues and laughably said, “You did everything right.”

Whenever I hear garbage like this, I remind myself that God protected Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania — and that He did so in a way that was obvious to everyone.

Was Trump tuned in to yesterday’s proceedings? You bet. He posted on Truth Social that Smith was being “DECIMATED” and calling him a “deranged animal, who shouldn’t be allowed to practice Law.”

As Fox News funnyman Greg Gutfeld often says, only half-jokingly: We don’t deserve him.