When House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan first contacted former special counsel Jack Smith in October, the Ohio Republican demanded the prosecutor appear before his panel. Smith responded rather quickly, telling Jordan that he’d love to answer the committee’s questions — but Smith wanted the hearing to be public so that everyone could see and hear his answers.

Jordan refused, preferring secrecy to sunlight.

In the weeks that followed, there were additional exchanges, and in each instance, Smith urged the GOP congressman to support transparency — to no avail. After a closed-door hearing in mid-December in which the special counsel offered several hours’ worth of answers, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, joked that Jordan “made an excellent decision in not allowing Jack Smith to testify publicly, because had he done so, it would have been absolutely devastating to the president and all the president’s men involved in the insurrectionary activities of Jan. 6.”’But even after that lengthy Q&A, the prosecutor continued to press the Judiciary Committee chair, practically pleading for a public hearing. Jordan eventually relented, culminating in Thursday’s televised proceedings.

Predictably, the hearing was an embarrassing failure for the panel’s majority party. MS NOW reported:

‘I’m thrilled and frankly stunned House Republicans called Jack Smith to testify,’ Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., told MS NOW, ‘because Jack Smith is reminding the American people of the criminal that Donald Trump is.’

That was a common refrain from Democrats on Thursday. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., argued that Smith ‘handled himself very well.’ Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., praised the hearing for ‘reminding people that this could happen again.’ And Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., told reporters that Republicans ‘must be regretting their decision’ to have Smith testify.

It’s difficult to say with confidence whether Jordan and his GOP colleagues lamented their decision, but hanging overhead is an unanswered question: Why did Jordan, after months of refusals, change his mind and provide Smith with a nationally televised platform? Why walk into an avoidable political buzzsaw that everyone saw coming?

To date, the Judiciary Committee chairman hasn’t elaborated on his motives, but the speculation has focused on a handful of possibilities:

Maybe Republican members had an exaggerated sense of their own competence. The closed-door Q-and-A with Smith last month was a failure for Jordan and his partisan allies, but it’s possible they saw that as a practice run and figured they’d have greater success the second time around. (They quickly learned otherwise.)

Maybe Republicans were looking for a distraction. Although I tend to be skeptical of arguments about political strategies rooted in diversion, it’s at least possible that GOP lawmakers surveyed their party’s many troubles and saw some value in giving the political world a topic from the recent past to focus on.

Maybe they were honoring Trump’s wishes. Even when Jordan was balking at a public hearing, the president said publicly that he preferred to see the special counsel answer questions during a televised hearing. Indeed, it’s worth emphasizing that Trump appears to have watched the proceedings (he claimed online that Smith was “decimated” during the hearing) and took the opportunity to publish multiple requests calling for the special counsel’s prosecution.

Maybe they were focused on the other half of Smith’s work. Thursday’s hearing was exclusively focused on Smith’s investigation into Trump’s alleged election-related crimes, because the findings from his other investigation, into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, are still under seal. Perhaps, as Raskin told MS NOW, the goal was to get the former special counsel under oath before his other report reached the public.

If this final point was on Republicans’ minds, Raskin made clear, during and after Thursday’s hearing, that Democrats want to continue the scrutiny with a follow-up hearing with Smith on the other criminal charges the president faced. Watch this space.