Newsman: Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday named Jack Smith to oversee the politically fraught investigations into former President Donald Trump. Smith is a career prosecutor and Garland vowed that he would carry out the job of looking into Trump in an “evenhanded and urgent manner.” Jack Smith will oversee a multi-pronged investigation into Trump’s alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election and the transfer of highly classified government documents to his Florida estate after exiting the White House.
“Based on recent developments, including the former president’s announcement that he is a candidate for president in the next election, and the sitting president’s stated intention to be a candidate as well, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a special counsel,” Garland said at a news conference.
“Such an appointment underscores the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters. It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.”
According to the Department of Justice, Jack Smith began his prosecutorial career in 1994 as an assistant district attorney in New York, has served since 2018 as the chief prosecutor for a special court in The Hague charged with adjudicating war crimes in Kosovo. He has resigned from that position to take on the new role.
In New York, Smith prosecuted matters ranging from gang murders of police officers to civil rights violations, according to the Department of Justice. From 2008 to 2010, he served with the International Criminal Court, where he supervised “sensitive investigations of foreign government officials and militia for war crimes,” according to a Department of Justice biography.
In a cable TV interview Friday, Former President Trump called Smith’s appointment as special counsel “so unfair” and “so political.”
In 2010, Smith returned to the Justice Department to serve as chief of the Public Integrity Section, where he led a team of more than 30 prosecutors who handled public corruption and election crimes cases across the United States, the Justice Department said. In 2015, he served as the First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, later becoming the Acting United States Attorney.
Attorney General Garland said Smith would oversee the investigation into whether “any person or entity” interfered with the transfer of power after the 2020 election. The department has been investigating alleged efforts to subvert the 2020 election and the summoning of the mob last year that led to the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
The second investigation involves the handling of classified documents and other records that were discovered during a search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August.
“Jack Smith is the consummate professional and career DOJ prosecutor,” tweeted Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor and a New York University law professor. “Not a political bone in his body. And a skilled and fast prosecutor who does not let the grass grow under his feet.”
