Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump, has a decades-long prosecution record, including high-profile public corruption cases.
U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland appointed Smith as special counsel Nov. 18, 2022, to lead two investigations: the handling of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago and whether anyone illegally interfered with the transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election.
Garland at the time said he was appointing a special prosecutor because of Trump’s announcement that he was running for president, and Joe Biden’s expected re-election campaign. (Garland named a separate special counsel to oversee an investigation of documents found at Biden’s home and office.) Dallas News.
This is from Wikipedia:
John Luman Smith (born June 5, 1969) is an American attorney who has served in the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) as an assistant United States Attorney, acting United States Attorney, and head of the department’s Public Integrity Section. He was also the chief prosecutor at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, an international tribunal at The Hague tasked with investigating and prosecuting war crimes in the Kosovo War.
In November 2022, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith an independent special counsel, responsible for overseeing two preexisting DOJ criminal investigations into former president Donald Trump: one regarding Trump’s role in the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack, and the other into alleged mishandling of government records, including classified documents. The second resulted in a 37-count indictment of Trump in June 2023.
Smith was born on born June 5, 1969. He grew up in Clay, New York, a suburb of Syracuse. In 1987, he graduated from Liverpool High School where he played football and baseball. He then studied political science at the State University of New York at Oneonta, graduating in 1991 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude. Smith then attended Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1994 with a Juris Doctor, cum laude.
What’s interesting is that we don’t know where he was born from this entry. Just when and where he grew up. Is he American?
Did you know the attorney prosecuting Trump is not even an American?
— Retro Coast (@RetroCoast) June 10, 2023
Jack Smith is a United Nations officer living in Belgium. He was flown to the US specifically to prosecute Trump. (And he dresses like a Klingon)
Who exactly is Jack Smith? #TrumpIndictment pic.twitter.com/skSLvJCIwI
From Yahoo:
Bringing historic federal charges against Donald Trump was just the start. The challenge for Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, as he prepares to argue in court that the former President illegally took national defense secrets to his Florida home and willfully defied efforts to get them back, is to make the charges stick.
No matter the merits of the case, the obstacles for Smith, a taciturn career prosecutor with a medieval-looking beard, are considerable. The case was assigned to a federal judge who has already been chided by an upper court for inappropriately favoring Trump in a ruling over documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago Club. Jurors will be selected from a state that Trump won in 2016 and 2020. And then there’s the personal attacks: Trump has already launched a campaign to impugn Smith’s motives, calling him a “Trump hater” and “deranged.”
The clock is ticking. The Southern District of Florida is known for presiding over a “rocket docket” that moves cases quickly. But even the speediest federal criminal trial can drag out, and Trump, who has spent decades stalling legal challenges, could try to push a verdict out past Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024. A lengthy trial in a high profile federal case is exactly what the Justice Department doesn’t want, with the integrity of the U.S. justice system and possibly the outcome of a presidential election, hanging in the balance.