Jack Smith Exhorts Ivy Leaguers To ‘Run Toward the Fire,’ Vents That Trump’s DOJ ‘Angers Me’

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s pointed critique of President Trump at an appearance at Dartmouth College last week highlights his criticism of the president he twice indicted — and whose cases were ultimately dismissed.Mr. Smith appeared at the Hanover campus to deliver the Constitution Day Roger S. Aaron ’64 Lecture at Dartmouth’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy. The school tells the Sun that the lecture drew a capacity crowd of 215 people, with 175 more watching via livestream. Mr. Smith, who received a standing ovation, declared that “people should be running towards the fire, not away from it.”Mr. Smith told the Dartmouth audience that “one of the things that frankly angers me now is the sort of attack that we see on public servants. My experience in my career is that the rule of law and integrity are intertwined. They’re together. You cannot have a functioning rule of law without people with integrity to enforce it.” He has previously accused Mr. Trump’s Justice Department of having been “corrupted.”The special counsel also denounced the DOJ’s pursuit of what he described as “retribution cases” against adversaries of Mr. Trump — a reference to the prosecutions of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, as well as former FBI Director James Comey. Mr. Smith reckons that this has caused the DOJ to “lose credibility.” He adds that “if the institution you work for is no longer credible with the courts and the juries, you’re not going to be effective with doing all the things that the Department of Justice does in keeping us safe.”Mr. Smith sounded a call to “reassert the rule of law” in America, though many Republicans see his two cases against Mr. Trump — for election interference and the retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago — as political in nature. Mr. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2022, three days after Mr. Trump declared his intention to reclaim the White House. Both prosecutions were dismissed after Mr. Trump won the 2024 election.In April, Mr. Smith told the Cosmos Club in the District of Columbia that “We have a Department of Justice today that targets people for criminal prosecution simply because the president doesn’t like them.” A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, Emily Covington, declared after those remarks that “I would expect nothing less from Jack Smith.” Mr. Trump pleaded “not guilty” to both cases, and neither reached even opening statements. Last year, Mr. Smith told the MS NOW legal commentator Andrew Weissmann — Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s deputy —at London that “Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on. There are rules in the department about how to bring a case — follow those rules. You can’t say: ‘I want this outcome. Let me throw the rules out.’” In January, Mr. Smith testified that he had collected evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Mr. Trump was guilty of a “criminal scheme” with respect to the 2020 election.Mr. Smith’s criticism of the DOJ comes as the prosecutor faces the possibility that he could face prosecution. In July, Congressman Jim Jordan referred the special counsel for possible criminal charges stemming from a deposition under oath in December, when Mr. Smith asserted that his investigation into January 6 — codenamed “Operation Arctic Frost” — only collected metadata from lawmakers, not text messages. Mr. Grassley calls the enterprise a “deeply flawed, weaponized investigation.”Convicting Mr. Smith could prove challenging because the law requires not only a statement that is untrue, but also that the untruth was made with an intention to deceive. A possible defense is the claim of “literal truth,” which involves the argument that testimony was true even if it was evasive or incomplete. The burden rests on the lawyer to ask the right question, not on the witness to volunteer information.Disclosures released by Senator Charles Grassley, though, show that Mr. Smith’s office did collect text messages. According to records released by Grassley and Senator Ron Johnson, investigators obtained and reviewed text messages from 44 members of Congress. The overall surveillance effort appears to have swept up dozens of lawmakers, though only Mr. Trump was criminally charged.Mr. Smith’s theory of the case, though, was dealt a blow in the summer of 2024 when the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. United States that official presidential acts are presumptively immune from prosecution. Unofficial ones lack that protection.Mr. Smith received good news on another front last week when the former president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaçi, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for war crimes including murder and torture by the Kosovo Specialist Chambers at the Hague. Mr. Smith was the prosecutor in charge of that case before he was hired as special counsel by Mr. Garland.

Jack Smith Exhorts Ivy Leaguers To ‘Run Toward the Fire,’ Vents That Trump’s DOJ ‘Angers Me’

Jack Smith Exhorts Ivy Leaguers To ‘Run Toward the Fire,’ Vents That Trump’s DOJ ‘Angers Me’

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