What Jack Smith and Lindsey Halligan Have in Common

Judge Aileen Cannon’s ruling blocking the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Mar-a-Lago report is suffused with righteous anger — and with good reason. The Florida jurist, who disqualified Mr. Smith and dismissed the case, details how he nevertheless “went ahead for months, undeterred” to compile his report. That persistence amounted to “a concerning breach of the spirit” of her order dismissing the case — “if not an outright violation of it.” That accusation resembles nothing so much as the denunciations hurled at another prosecutor — President Trump’s handpicked United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan. She, like Mr. Smith, was disqualified by a federal judge as unlawfully appointed and therefore unable to wield prosecutorial power. Like Mr. Smith, her suspension entailed the dismissal of charges, in her case against James Comey and Letitia James. Ms. Halligan, also like Mr. Smith, did not immediately set down her prosecutorial pencil following an adverse ruling. That caused another judge, David Novak, to issue an order commanding her to stop “masquerading” as a top prosecutor. Judge Novak writes that only her “inexperience” held him back from “referring her for further investigation and disciplinary action regarding her misrepresentations to this Court at this time.”Judge Novak also suggested that Attorney General Pam Bondi could also come in for sanctions if she continued to support Ms. Halligan. Might the same be said of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who supervised Mr. Smith’s work after Judge Cannon ruled that he was appointed sans authority. Ms. Halligan accuses Judge Novak of making a “rudimentary” mistake. Mr. Garland reasoned that Judge Cannon made a “basic mistake about the law.”Ms. Halligan eventually stood down, and Mr. Smith resigned days before Mr. Trump swore the oath for a second time. The special counsel, though, has hardly faded into the sunset. Judge Cannon’s concern that releasing the report would injure the due process rights of Mr. Trump and his co-defendants has been amply bolstered by Mr. Smith’s claims that Mr. Trump was guilty, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” of a “criminal scheme.”Judge Cannon, though, calls the Mar-a-Lago report “the work product of an unconstitutional government actor” that “contains material whose disclosure would impinge upon colorable and uncontested claims of privilege and grand jury secrecy.” That’s no small matter, and touches on constitutional bedrock. Judge Cannon writes that following her disqualification of Mr. Smith, he “accelerated” his efforts “to prepare and finalize a Final Report.”We raise the parallels between Ms. Halligan and Mr. Smith because while the former is often seen as a loyalist to Mr. Trump — she was a defense lawyer for the 47th president and was appointed by him to review the Smithsonian — the special counsel places himself in the empyrean above politics. Mr. Smith has declared that “the idea that politics played a role in who worked on that case, or who got chosen, is ludicrous.” He also called political considerations “laughable.”Judge Cannon, though, was hardly laughing. She writes in respect of her order of dismissal that Mr. Smith tried to “circumvent it, for months, by taking the discovery generated in this case and compiling it in a final report for transmission to then-Attorney General Garland, to Congress, and then beyond. The Court need not countenance this brazen stratagem or effectively perpetuate the Special Counsel’s breach of this Court’s own order.”Little, then, would appear to separate the actions of Ms. Halligan and Mr. Smith except the political affiliations of the attorneys general who handed them their positions. Both took on prosecutions that appear to be political. Both sought to cling to their posts even after judges ruled that they were appointed without legal ballast. Only Mr. Smith, though, tried to defy a court to make public evidence while the accused lacked a court in which to answer.

What Jack Smith and Lindsey Halligan Have in Common

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