Jack Smith, the U.S. special counsel who has pursued criminal charges against former President Donald Trump over retention of classified government records, has a history of prosecuting politicians from both parties — with mixed results.
Appointed last November by Attorney General Merrick Garland to take over two Justice Department investigations involving Trump, Smith now has made history as the first federal prosecutor to secure an indictment against a current or former U.S. president.
Smith, a Harvard Law School graduate who is not registered with any political party, started as a prosecutor in 1994 at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office under Robert Morgenthau, who was best known for prosecuting mob bosses.
In 1999, Smith started working at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn.
Smith was involved in the prosecution of Charles Schwarz, one of several former New York City police officers implicated in a high-profile police brutality case involving Abner Louima, a jailed Black inmate who had been assaulted by police with a broomstick.
In 2008, Smith left to supervise war crime prosecutions at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He returned to the Justice Department from 2010 to 2015 to head its Public Integrity Section under Eric Holder, attorney general for President Barack Obama.
After leaving the DOJ in 2015, he served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, and became acting U.S attorney in 2017, CNN reports.
But during his time at the DOJ, he faced scrutiny by Republicans for his part in the Lois Lerner scandal involving the IRS's targeting of conservative and religious groups over their tax-exempt status.
"Jack Smith was looking for ways to prosecute the innocent Americans that Lois Lerner targeted during the IRS scandal," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told the Washington Examiner at the time.
Smith admitted looking into the matter after seeing interviews with Lerner and another IRS official in The New York Times, but testified that no actions were ever taken by his office.
Among other actions are the following:
- Smith secured a conviction of former Republican Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in 2015 when he was with the DOJ for bribery-related charges, but the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction in 2018. In November 2022, McDonnell said regarding Jack Smith, "I think there's a real judgment problem."
- Smith pursued a case against Democrat Sen. John Edwards for allegedly using money from his presidential campaign supporters to give to filmmaker Rielle Hunter, with whom he was having an affair as his wife was dying of cancer. That case ended in a hung jury and mistrial.
- Smith also prosecuted Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., in a bribery scheme with a Florida ophthalmologist, but it resulted in a mistrial.
Earlier this month, Rep. Jordan launched a probe to conduct oversight over Smith's probe into Trump for the handling of papers at Mar-A-Lago, seeking an unredacted memo over the scope of Smith's probe.
Information from Newsmax staffer Jack Gournell and Reuters news service was used in this report.