As donald trumpon Tuesday jack smith Did not say not a word before Judge Jonathan Goodman in courtroom on the 13th floor of the Wilkie D Ferguson Jr. Federal Courts Building in Miami. Like Trump, Smith kept the serious countenance. The former president and the special prosecutor who is investigating him entered a black chapter in the history of the United States that day, the first indictment with federal charges of a president, active or retired. And the two shared the silence, the grave gesture, but their paths until there, and their circumstances, couldn’t be more different.
Smith, of 54 yearsis the man who on November 18, three days after Trump formally launched his 2024 presidential race, was announced by US Attorney General Merrick Garland as the special prosecutor that Justice put in charge of the two investigations that the department had open against Trump: for the efforts to reject the results of the presidential elections and prevent the peaceful transition of power to Joe Biden that culminated in the assault on the Capitol, investigations that are still open ; and for him irregular handling of classified documents when he left the White Housethe case that has now led to the historic indictment with 37 charges for seven federal crimes.
It was a commission that someone like John Luman Smith. since he left harvard After going through the State University of New York in Oneonta, 200 kilometers from his native Clay, in the north of the state, he has spent practically all his professional life, except for a brief hiatus working in private law for the largest private hospital corporation, dedicated to public service of justice.
The race
He did it first between 1994 and 1999 in the Manhattan District Attorney’s OfficeThe same as now, led by Alvin Bragg, has also made history by charging Trump with state criminal charges for the case of payments to silence Stormy Daniels. He then spent nearly a decade in the Eastern District Attorney’s Office in Brooklynwhere he worked on nearly a hundred criminal cases against gangs, violent crime, fraud or corruption. The same persecuted the police officers who brutally sodomized Haitian immigrant Abner Louima than the head of a gang that killed two plainclothes agents.
After spending two years working at the Hague court, Smith returned to the US to join the Department of Justice Public Integrity Section. Then he went to the Nashville (Tennessee) prosecutor’s office, at whose head he came to be on an interim basis. And in 2018 Return to Hague, where he has been prosecuting war crimes at the Special Court for Kosovo, where he won the sentencing of Salih Mustafa, former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and the indictment of former president Hashim Thaci, a case he had to leave in the hands of others when he received the call from Garland.
Throughout this career, Smith has carved out a reputation like someone tireless and tough, tenacious and independent, and as careful and talented as a lawyer than as a manager of his teams. Also, as “the most meticulous and creative researcher“, as a former colleague told ‘The New York Times’.
“If the case can be prosecuted, it will. He is not afraid of anythinganother former colleague told Reuters. And there are undoubtedly something fierce and competitive in a man who is also like that outside the courts, given over to the triathlonsof which he has completed more than 100, and who has completed nine Iron Man competitionsalthough he didn’t start swimming seriously until he was 30 and has had on the bike two serious accidents.
Moral imperatives and political poison
The former colleague in the Brooklyn prosecutor’s office explained that Smith went to The Hague “drawn to both challenge and importance, the moral imperative” of that mission. The one that Garland has commissioned touches even closer to someone who, in an interview in 2018 with a sports publication, responded when asked what kind of impression he wanted to leave on people: “Like most, I think I want to dedicate my energies to make my community and the world a better place for my daughter to grow up in“, Josie, you have in your marriage with the documentary filmmaker Katy Chevigny.
Your mission is now cause inevitably poisoned politically. With the appointment of Smith Justice, an agency that, although it should function independently of the president, is part of his government, tried to reinforce and underline that independence in the face of the unprecedented situation of having to prosecute a political rival of Biden’s. But that has not prevented Trump, his defenders and supporters, and the conservative media from talking about politicization and accusing and insulting Biden, Garland, and especially Smith.
There are no limits for the Republican. It matters little that Smith is politically registered as independent: Between insults like “thug,” “lunatic” and “fascist,” Trump slips in accusations, without giving evidence, of partisanship and bias. He has shared articles highlighting that Smith’s wife produced a Michelle Obama documentary and has donated money to Democratic policies and causes, and they even remember the links of his late mother-in-law with organizations linked to George Soros either Hillary Clinton.
Trump has also tried to portray Smith as a “loser“, highlighting cases that in his time in different prosecutors did not come to fruition, or some in which the conviction he achieved was later revoked by the Supreme Court. But even James Trusty, one of Trump’s lawyers who abandoned his defense one day after the federal indictment became known, has defined Smith as a “formidable rival“.
The special prosecutor, for his part, shows cool determination despite the campaign of harassment and smear. And he echoes the phrase that he pronounced years ago, when someone questioned that several investigations had not ended in trials or convictions: “If I was the type of person to be intimidated I would look for another job“he said then.
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Last Friday, when Trump’s impeachment document was made public, Smith appeared before the press to make a brief two-minute statement. “The adherence to the rule of law is a founding tenet of the Department of Justice, and our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world,” he said. “We have a set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone“.
Four days later, he was sitting in a second-row bench in the Miami courthouse behind the three representatives of the prosecution, about twenty feet from Trump and his lawyers. During the nearly 50 minutes that the session lasted, Smith kept unharmed. Although he is famous in the legal world for his style in court, this time let others speak how did he let him talk detailed statement of charges who has produced a devastating narrative which covers the illegal retention of classified documents endangering national security, the efforts and conspiracy to try to hide them and obstruct government investigation and false testimony. After the session was over, Smith left without looking back.