Former special counsel Jack Smith, whose historic prosecution of Donald Trump was upended by the president’s reelection final 12 months, insisted that the pair of felony instances he introduced in opposition to Trump have been untainted by politics.
But the present Trump Justice Department is completely different, Smith mentioned in a latest wide-ranging interview with former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann at the University College London made out there Tuesday.
Smith criticized how the Trump DOJ has dealt with several-high profile instances and lamented the influence its strikes could have on the justice system writ giant.
His feedback present a window into the considering of a person the public hardly ever noticed throughout his yearslong investigation of Trump and are available as Republicans are ramping up probes into how Smith labored.
Here are the key takeaways:
Defends his investigation and says politics performed no function
During the dialogue with Weissmann, who labored on former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Smith mentioned it was “absolutely ludicrous” that politics would play a job in his probes into Trump.
“The idea that politics would play a role in big cases like this, it’s absolutely ludicrous and it’s totally contrary to my experience as a prosecutor,” Smith mentioned.
Smith supervised a group of prosecutors who investigated and secured indictments of the then-former president in two separate probes: one for the retention of categorised paperwork in Florida, and one other for alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election.
The group of prosecutors who labored for him throughout his time as special counsel have been additionally not involved in politics, Smith mentioned.
“These are team players who don’t want to do anything but good in the world. They’re not interested in politics,” Smith mentioned. “I get very concerned when I see how easy it is to demonize these people for political ends when these are the very sort of people I think we should be celebrating.”
Meanwhile, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan is requesting an interview with Smith as Republicans look to painting former President Joe Biden’s Justice Department as retaliatory in opposition to Trump.
The request despatched Tuesday comes one week after Senate Republicans introduced that the FBI, as half of Smith’s January 6 investigation, used courtroom orders in 2023 to acquire the cellphone information of 9 GOP lawmakers, a transfer the senators referred to as “political weaponization.
At one level, Smith, who labored for years as a federal prosecutor, ripped into the Justice Department over the way it’s operated underneath Trump, skewering it for permitting what he views as an unprecedented quantity of politicization into the nation’s justice system.
“Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on,” Smith mentioned. “Process shouldn’t be a political issue, right? Like if there’s rules in the department about how to bring a case, follow those rules. You can’t say, ‘I want this outcome, let me throw the rules out.’”
Smith pointed to the federal expenses introduced final month in opposition to former FBI Director James Comey and the resolution to drop the federal felony case in opposition to New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, as two examples of how the division was working out of the norm in Trump’s second time period.
Federal prosecutors dropped the case in opposition to Adams, which was introduced final 12 months, after the mayor agreed to work with Trump in his effort to crack down on unlawful immigration.
“Nothing like it has ever happened that I’ve ever heard of,” Smith mentioned of the Adams case.
Who is the former Trump lawyer prosecuting ex-FBI Director James Comey?
Comey, in the meantime, pleaded not responsible final week to 2 expenses stemming from alleged false statements he made to Congress throughout testimony in 2020. A Trump-installed prosecutor in Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, secured an indictment in opposition to the former FBI director after Trump publicly complained the Justice Department wasn’t transferring aggressively sufficient.
“This latest prosecution of the former director of the FBI. You know, there’s a process to secure an indictment,” Smith mentioned. “There’s a process of predication, having some evidence before you do that … The career prosecutors, the apolitical prosecutors who analyzed this said there wasn’t a case and so they brought somebody in who had never been a criminal prosecutor on days’ notice to secure an indictment a day before the statute of limitations ended.”
“That just reeks of lack of process,” he mentioned.
Smith, who has served underneath each Democratic and Republican presidents, mentioned he believes the political appointees atop the Justice Department are performing in another way than in earlier administrations.
Career prosecutors are “being asked to do things that they think are wrong and because they’re not political people, they’re not going to do them,” Smith mentioned.
“And I think that explains why you’ve seen the resignations, you’ve seen people leave the department,” Smith mentioned. “It’s not because they’re enemies of one administration or the next. They’ve worked through decades for different administrations. It’s just they’ve been doing things apolitically forever. And when they’re told, ‘No, you got to get this outcome no matter what,’ that is so contrary to how we were all raised as prosecutors.”
The instances Smith introduced in opposition to Trump have been slowed down and finally sophisticated by the Supreme Court’s consideration of whether Trump enjoyed broad immunity from felony prosecution for his actions in workplace.
But Smith, who, when Trump was reelected, was in the course of of making an attempt to salvage the instances after the excessive courtroom determined he had substantial presidential immunity, mentioned Wednesday that there was a large interpretation of immunity as the query made its method by means of decrease courts and finally as much as the justices.
“The district court, the appellate court, and the dissent (at the Supreme Court) strongly weighted the rule of law considerations,” Smith mentioned. “The majority opinion strongly weighted the other considerations, and to your point, and brought up your point of, ‘Well if you do this, there’s going to be this response.’”
Though Smith doesn’t agree with the Supreme Court’s ruling, he instructed Weissmann that his workplace by no means questioned whether or not they would comply with the resolution.
“I think a really important thing to understand here is, while I didn’t agree … we followed it. There was never a question that we were going to follow the law as the Supreme Court said the law now was,” Smith mentioned.
But he mentioned he was involved that the courtroom’s ruling was “tantamount to saying you can never prosecute powerful, high officials.”
“The problem is not prosecuting high officials who did something wrong when you do it according to the processes of law in your country,” he added. “It’s the retaliation. That’s the problem and that’s the thing that we should preventing.”
While Smith was investigating Trump for his retention of categorised paperwork, Attorney General Merrick Garland additionally appointed one other special counsel, Robert Hur, to research Biden probably having possession of categorised paperwork as effectively.
Smith and Hur in the end got here to completely different conclusions, and Hur determined to not deliver expenses in opposition to Biden. Smith identified that the principal distinction between the two instances was the info that have been introduced to prosecutors investigating the case.
“The difference is the facts. The rule of law allows for different outcomes when the facts are different. One of the major differences between the two cases is the obstructive conduct in the case that I investigated,” Smith mentioned.
Smith defined to his viewers that as a prosecutor making an attempt to show that somebody retained categorised paperwork, the prosecutor wants proof that the defendant “willingly” saved possession of the data.
“To prove an illegal possession of classified documents, you need to show that you possessed the documents, or the defendant possessed the documents, willfully. And that means that he knew what he was doing was wrong.”
Smith mentioned he had “tons of evidence” that Trump had willingly retained the categorised paperwork, and that the investigation into Biden didn’t have the similar type of proof.
“The evidence to not give the documents back when the government even tried to get them back before there was a criminal investigation … and then after the investigation started, still refusing to give them back, and then trying to obstruct the investigation, that helps prove willfulness,” Smith mentioned. “That sort of evidence didn’t exist in the other case.”
