Former special counsel Jack Smith said Thursday that the United States is facing an attack on the rule of law unlike anything he has witnessed in his career.
Smith, who charged Donald Trump in 2023 with undertaking a criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election results and with mishandling classified materials, spoke on MS Now. He said judges can no longer trust the Justice Department as it has been reconstituted under the current Trump administration.
"That's happening every day. And so regardless of what you think politically, they're just not effective at doing their job anymore," Smith said of the DOJ.
Smith said the department has abandoned institutional knowledge and expertise. "They've jettisoned expertise. We have a situation where we've got rid of people who know how to protect our national security. And we think that that's somehow not going to have an effect on our national security," he said.
He also said people inside the department are being targeted for simply carrying out their responsibilities. He pointed to specific instances where federal prosecutors refused to participate in what he described as retribution prosecutions. "Prosecutors in Minnesota were like, I'm not going to investigate the family member of a shooting victim. I'm not doing that," Smith said, referring to shootings involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during the administration's immigration crackdown.
Smith also raised concerns about the pardons Trump granted to those convicted in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"There's the obvious cost of recidivism. These are people who committed their crimes in the name and in the interest of Donald Trump, and he's returned the favor by pardoning them," Smith said.
He said the pardons send a troubling message beyond just the recipients. "That sends one message to them; a message I'm equally concerned about is the message that it sends to law enforcement," he said.
Smith said the pardons are "just plain wrong" and that he is "very concerned" about the integrity of the upcoming midterm elections. "The people who perpetrated Jan. 6 have probably learned from how they did that," he said.
Both cases Smith brought against Trump were ultimately dropped. The classified documents case was tossed by a federal judge who ruled Smith's appointment was unconstitutional. The election interference case was dropped following Trump's reelection, consistent with Justice Department policy barring prosecution of a sitting president. Trump had pleaded not guilty to all charges in both cases.
"We did this case the way I've done cases throughout my career, same investigative techniques, same use of the tools that a federal prosecutor has," Smith said.
