Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice secured indictments of Donald J. Trump, said it was “ludicrous” to suggest he was motivated by partisan politics — and offered a scathing denunciation of the Trump Justice Department — in his first extended remarks since resigning in January.
“The idea that politics played a role in who worked on that case, or who got chosen, is ludicrous,” Mr. Smith said during an Oct. 8 interview with the former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann at the University College London that was posted online Tuesday.
Mr. Smith offered a dour hourlong assessment of Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution against his enemies, rebuking the indictments of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general, over the objections of career prosecutors. He also called out the forced resignations of prosecutors who unsuccessfully opposed White House efforts to drop the bribery case against Mayor Eric Adams of New York.
“Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on,” he said.
“There are rules in the department about how to bring a case — follow those rules,” he added. “You can’t say: ‘I want this outcome. Let me throw the rules out.’”
The abrupt re-emergence of Mr. Smith, a veteran public integrity and war crimes prosecutor cast as a “deranged” partisan by Mr. Trump, comes as the president ramps up demands for payback and his congressional allies increase pressure on Biden-era officials seen as his enemies. And Mr. Smith is the biggest.
On Tuesday, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee summoned Mr. Smith to testify behind closed doors about what they called “partisan and politically motivated prosecutions” of Mr. Trump.
Representative Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who is the chairman of the panel, demanded that Mr. Smith appear by Oct. 28 but did not issue a legally binding subpoena.
A spokesman for Mr. Smith had no comment.
While Republican lawmakers publicly celebrated the move, they have been more circumspect privately, expressing concern that offering a public arena for Mr. Smith, a self-assured prosecutor comfortable in high-pressure situations, could backfire by undermining the narrative that the investigations were unjustified.
Mr. Smith joked that his first boss would have thrown him “out the window” if he had expressed a political or personal motive for bringing a case, in a rare moment of levity during an hour of otherwise sober conversation.
Mr. Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in November 2022, was most passionate in his defense of the career prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who worked for him, many of them subsequently purged by Trump political appointees without evidence they had done anything wrong.
“They do not like to tell their own story. They cannot start a sentence with I; they start that with we,” he said. “These are team players who don’t want anything but to do good in the world. They’re not interested in politics.”
Mr. Smith added that he was “very concerned” about efforts to “demonize these people for political ends when these are the very sort of people I think we should be celebrating.”
Trump law enforcement officials, working closely with congressional Republicans, have targeted career F.B.I. agents and prosecutors who worked for Mr. Smith for termination without providing verified evidence of wrongdoing, citing Mr. Trump’s broad powers under Article II of the Constitution.
Earlier this month, Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, fired two agents who were identified as having worked with Mr. Smith. Both were bureau veterans with excellent performance records. They had been identified as associates of Mr. Smith in documents obtained by Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In his role as special counsel, Mr. Smith brought two foiled federal prosecutions against Mr. Trump — a case accusing him of retaining classified documents after leaving office and obstructing efforts to retrieve them in Florida, and charges stemming from his effort to overturn the 2020 election in Washington. Both were dropped after Mr. Trump won the 2024 presidential election.
Mr. Smith shrugged off criticism about the pace of both cases, saying that his team — and Justice Department officials who worked on the election interference case before he arrived — moved as fast as possible given the demands of collecting evidence sufficient to obtain convictions.
“The idea of people criticizing things — particularly in the media — if you are a good prosecutor, that is noise, and you need to tune it out,” he said, adding, “We do all our work by the book.”
Mr. Smith painted a dire picture of the department’s future. He said the firings and resignations of experienced career prosecutors, particularly in the national security division, would hamstring the department for years.
“If you think getting rid of the people who know most about national security is going to make our country safer, you do not know anything about national security,” he said.
For years, Mr. Jordan, as head of the judiciary panel, has been scrutinizing the special counsel’s office, accusing it of attempting to silence Mr. Trump and raiding his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, in an unnecessary and “abusive” fashion. He has accused Mr. Smith and his team, without evidence, of manipulating evidence in the case.
On Tuesday, Mr. Jordan wrote a letter summoning Mr. Smith to Capitol Hill for testimony needed “to understand the full extent to which the Biden-Harris Justice Department weaponized federal law enforcement.” The letter accused Mr. Smith of “abusive surveillance” of lawmakers and of “prosecutorial misconduct and constitutional abuses.”
Mr. Jordan claimed Mr. Smith’s prosecutorial tactics were “so flagrant that the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility confirmed to the committee in November 2024 that it had opened an inquiry.”
Mr. Jordan appeared to be referring to a so-called self-filed complaint from a member of Mr. Trump’s defense team, Stanley Woodward Jr., against a career national security official who was working on the Florida documents investigation. Such complaints are not proof of guilt, and there are no indications that the inquiry uncovered any wrongdoing. Mr. Woodward is now a senior Justice Department official.
Democrats immediately pointed out the paradox of House Republicans accusing Mr. Smith of “politically motivated prosecutions” just days after the acting U.S. attorney secured the indictment of Ms. James amid Mr. Trump’s calls for her prosecution on social media.
The request for all documents and communications and a transcribed interview, Mr. Jordan wrote on Tuesday, was part of the committee’s investigation into what he described as the former special counsel’s “partisan and politically motivated” prosecutions of Mr. Trump and his co-defendants.
It was not the first time Mr. Jordan had wielded his gavel in the service of Mr. Trump’s vendettas.
Acting as one of the president’s top allies in Congress, Mr. Jordan in 2023 issued a letter demanding documents and testimony from Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, whom he accused of “an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority” after his indictment of Mr. Trump that year.
But Democrats on Capitol Hill celebrated Mr. Jordan’s request as an unexpected victory for transparency.
“Chairman Jordan’s letter today to Jack Smith clearly demands the release of Smith’s full report, and all accompanying records, from his investigation into Donald Trump’s hoarding of classified documents and obstruction of justice at Mar-a-Lago,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “An extraordinary yearslong MAGA cover-up has deprived the American public of the opportunity to read this special counsel report that the taxpayers paid for.”
He added: “We look forward to finally receiving the Jack Smith report on Trump and the classified documents!”
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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