Trump Calls for Jack Smith To ‘Be Brought to Justice’ as Outrage Grows at Surveillance of President’s Aides and GOP Senators

President Trump’s post to Truth Social on Tuesday declaring that “Deranged Jack Smith should be brought to Justice, NOW!!!” underscores how the antagonism between the president and the prosecutor is far from dissipated. That demand lands just as outrage is growing among Republicans about what they are now learning about how Ms. Smith was secretly accessing their phone records during his investigation and prosecution of Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump reposted a clip of Mr. Smith testifying before Congress in January as well as a gloss from another user that Mr. Smith “looks absolutely DEFEATED! Lock Him Up!!!” The interest in the special counsel who sought twice to convict Mr. Trump comes after all charges against Mr. Trump were dismissed, war rages in the Middle East and Mr. Smith has transitioned to the private sphere, founding his own firm.Last month Mr. Trump boosted a message that reckoned that “Jack Smith MUST be held accountable or it will happen over and over again. Lock him up.” In October, the 47th president posted that “Deranged Jack Smith is a criminal!!!” Mr. Trump has expressed the hope that Attorney General Pam Bondi “is looking at what he’s done, including some of the crooked and corrupt witnesses that he was attempting to use in his case against me.”Mr. Smith was appointed in late November, 2022 and he sought to to convict Mr. Trump in the tight window before the 2024 election. In recent months, some of his aggressive tactics targeting Trump allies for surveillance have come to light. Mr. Smith’s January 6 probe, codenamed “Operation Arctic Frost,” has also come under scrutiny for sweeping up telephone surveillance data — via subpoenas and non-disclosure agreements — from some 10 GOP lawmakers, all but one of them senators. Late last month, Reuters reported that Mr. Smith had secretly subpoenaed the phone records of FBI director Kash Patel and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in 2022 and 2023. In August the Department of Justice, acting pursuant to a referral from Senator Tom Cotton, opened an investigation into whether Mr. Smith may have violated the Hatch Act – the law that prohibits some federal employees from undertaking actions to influence elections – in his aggressive push to try Mr. Trump at the height of the 2024 election. The effort was abetted by a willing, Obama-appointed judge, Tanya Chutkan, but disrupted by the Supreme Court ruling. Mr. Smith’s attorneys argue that “The predicate for this investigation is imaginary and unfounded. Mr. Smith followed well-established legal principles in conducting the investigations into President Trump.” During Mr. Smith’s testimony in January he was asked whether he expected the attention of federal prosecutors. The special counsel responded that “I believe that they will do everything in their power to do that because they’ve been ordered to by the president.” Mr. Smith has consistently defended his cases as airtight “beyond a reasonable doubt,” claims that Mr. Trump was guilty of a “criminal scheme” to overturn the result of the 2020 election. Mr. Smith also sought to imprison Mr. Trump for the retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.Both of Mr. Smith’s cases ended when Mr. Trump won reelection, though both had also struggled even before the outcome of the 2024 vote. The Supreme Court dealt Mr. Smith a blow when it ruled in Trump v. United States that official presidential acts are presumptively immune from prosecution. Judge Aileen Cannon ruled in the documents case that Mr. Smith was unlawfully appointed and dismissed the charges against Mr. Trump and his co-defendants.When Mr. Trump regained the White House, Attorney General Bondi convened a “Weaponization Working Group” whose remit includes investigating “Special Counsel Jack Smith and his staff, who spent more than $50 million targeting President Trump, and the prosecutors and law enforcement personnel who participated in the unprecedented raid” on Mar-a-Lago. That group was rebooted last month after failing to make much headway.The Trump Administration has already launched proceedings against other high-profile critics of the 47th president. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, was charged with bank fraud related to the purchase of a modest home in Virginia. In 2024, she won a civil fraud verdict — and a verdict of some $500 million — in New York against Mr. Trump, his two adult sons, and their family business. That judgement was overturned on appeal as an “excessive” fine in violation of the Constitution.The Department of Justice also secured charges against another critic of Mr. Trump — the former director of the FBI, James Comey. He was charged with lying to Congress for testimony he delivered in 2020 about leaks relating to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The cases against Ms. James and Mr. Comey, though, were dismissed after a federal judge ruled that the prosecutor in charge, Lindsey Halligan, was unlawfully appointed.The DOJ has vowed to appeal those dismissals, which are part of a broader struggle that stretches from coast to coast between the Executive Branch and the federal bench over the power to appoint prosecutors.

Trump Calls for Jack Smith To ‘Be Brought to Justice’ as Outrage Grows at Surveillance of President’s Aides and GOP Senators

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