Who Is Jack Smith? More on the New Special Counsel Investigating Trump

Jack Smith, the newly appointed special counsel to investigate Donald Trump, has a long history of investigating criminal cases.

Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday to investigate Trump’s role in the January 6 attack and his handling of classified documents, has promised to “exercise independent judgment” in the case.

He started his career in the 1990s, first as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and then in a similar position at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.

After almost two decades there, Smith moved to the Netherlands, where he oversaw war crimes investigations at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

He has also worked with the U.S. Department of Justice before, from 2010 to 2015, when he served as chief of the Public Integrity Section overseeing public corruption and elections-related investigations.

In 2018, he became the chief prosecutor at the special court in the Hague investigating war crimes committed during the Kosovo War.*

During his previous tenure at the Justice Department, Smith and his team won two notable corruption cases. First, they won a conviction against former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell, but the Supreme Court overturned it.

They also won a conviction against former Arizona Representative Rick Renzi, who was sentenced to three years in prison. Trump pardoned Renzi in January 2021, part of a slew of eleventh-hour pardons during his last days as president.

* This piece misstated when Smith investigated war crimes committed during the Kosovo War.

On Friday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel to oversee investigations into former President Donald Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, and his illegal possession of classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago.

Trump, for his part, says he’s not going to “partake” in the special counsel inquiry—as if it’s up to him.

“I have been going through this for six years—for six years I have been going through this, and I am not going to go through it anymore,” Trump told Fox News.

The twice-impeached, twice-popular-vote-losing former president’s comments come just days after his announcement for a third consecutive presidential run. “It is so unfair. It is so political,” he said about the inquiry.

Garland said he appointed a special counsel knowing that Trump would be seeking another term as president.

Jack Smith, a former assistant U.S. attorney and chief to the DOJ’s public integrity section, will guide the investigation into Trump’s possession of classified documents after leaving the White House, and whether he obstructed the government’s initial investigation into the case. Smith will also look into Trump and his allies’ efforts to interrupt the transfer of power following the 2020 election.

Smith said in a statement Friday that he intends to “conduct the assigned investigations, and any prosecutions that may result from them, independently,” and that “the pace of the investigations will not pause or flag” under his watch.

The case provides further kindling to the sparks burning within the Republican party.  “I hope the Republicans have the courage to fight this,” Trump warned, giving everyone in his party a chance to prove their loyalty or commit to distancing themselves from the former president. Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have already jumped in to defend Trump and attack President Joe Biden and the Justice Department.

As soon as Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate Donald Trump, Republicans entered meltdown mode.

Garland announced Friday that he had appointed Jack Smith, a prosecutor at The Hague, to look into Trump’s role in the January 6 attack and his handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

“Based on recent developments, including Trump’s announcement that he is a candidate for president in the next election, and the current president’s intention to be a candidate in the next election, I have concluded it is in the public interest to appoint a special counsel,” Garland explained at a press conference.

Trump’s campaign immediately blasted the move, calling it a “totally expected political stunt by a feckless, politicized, weaponized Biden Department of Justice.”

And many far-right Republicans also went nuts.

Senator Ted Cruz accused President Joe Biden of using the Justice Department to “attack his political opponents.”

“This is Trump derangement syndrome but this time with a gun and badge,” he said.

Representative Claudia Tenney said the investigation will move the department’s “focus even further away from the real threat to the rule of law: President Joe Biden’s role in Hunter’s corrupt enterprises.”

She wasn’t alone, as Senator John Cornyn also called for a special counsel to look into Hunter Biden.

Far-right news outlet Newsmax similarly demanded why there was “no special prosecutor for the Hunter Biden laptop?”

Smith, who has investigated war crimes committed during the Kosovo War, promised for his part to “exercise independent judgment.”

The outcry over Smith’s appointment shows that Trump still has loyal allies in politics, even if voters and many former backers seem to be turning on him.

Republicans are doubling down on the strategy that helped the red wave crash.

In a letter released Friday, a total of 101 Republican National Committee members endorsed Chair Ronna McDaniel for reelection. Citing “the extremist consensus among Democrat Party elites,” they credit McDaniel for turning the RNC “into an aggressive and effective advocate for election integrity, including by engaging in over 80 lawsuits,” among other things.

The letter is proof that despite a growing number of Republicans speaking out against Trumpism, large segments of the GOP remain committed to the project.

McDaniel herself has long stoked election denialism. Under her leadership, the RNC spent at least $20 million to oppose Democratic efforts to make voting easier during the pandemic. Just a few months before the election, McDaniel posted an RNC-sponsored video fearmongering about voter fraud due to vote-by-mail expansions.

In November 2018, McDaniel pressed Arizona Senate candidate Martha McSally to be more aggressive in stirring doubt in the vote count of the election she lost to Kyrsten Sinema.

The RNC chair is also no stranger to Trumpian corruption. In 2020, ProPublica reported that the RNC gave six-figure contracts to companies linked to McDaniel’s husband and her political backers. In 2019, it was revealed that McDaniel was involved in a pay-to-play scheme that would net the RNC $500,000 in exchange for an ambassadorship to the Bahamas.

And if Republicans ever complain about “civility,” note that McDaniel spent the final days of the 2022 midterm campaign mocking now-Senator John Fetterman’s and President Joe Biden’s speech patterns. Fetterman had just suffered a stroke, and Biden grew up with a stutter.

Some may find it perplexing that Republicans are embracing the kind of conspiratorial agenda that made them lose before. The choice is not actually a result of the party embracing Trumpism over some reasoned, people-serving platform. Instead, this kind of hollow politics is all Republicans seem to have at their disposal. After all, 60 percent of committee members have endorsed McDaniel—and all she represents.

Trump-endorsed New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin has also expressed interest in running for RNC chair. A showdown between two Republicans trying to out-Trump each other will surely add to the GOP’s disarray.

Evangelical Christians who previously backed Donald Trump are now accusing him of using them to further his own goals, after he gave them everything on their agenda.

Major figures in the community have said they don’t support Trump’s third bid for president and accused him of acting purely for personal gain in his previous runs. “He used us to win the White House. We had to close our mouths and eyes when he said things that horrified us,” Christian Zionist Mike Evans told The Washington Post.

Trump both campaigned and governed on a largely evangelical Christian platform. He moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem; he cracked down on immigration from majority-Muslim countries; and he appointed multiple conservative judges, including to the Supreme Court, which has swung sharply right.

He made good on his anti-abortion promises when the high court removed the nationwide right to the procedure in June. Many LGBTQ protections were rolled back under his watch, and during the June 2020 protests over George Floyd’s murder by police, he tear-gassed demonstrators so he could take a heavily posed picture with a Bible in front of St. John’s Church near the White House.

But Republican voters and the party in general have begun to turn on Trump, making it look less and less likely that he’ll be able to secure the Republican nomination in 2024. And as power slips from his grasp, evangelical Christians are souring on him too.

“The Republican Party is headed toward a civil war that I have no desire or need to be part of,” pastor and former Trump ally Robert Jeffress told Newsweek when asked if he would back the former president.

But should Trump get the nomination, “I will happily support him,” Jeffress added.

Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid castigated the Christian leaders for their hypocrisy.

“You knew exactly what you were doing when you excused his sexual abuse, his racism, his Islamophobia, his antisemitism, his white nationalism, his greed, & his corruption,” he tweeted. “You used him—and you lost.”