Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated Donald J. Trump and is now the subject of intense attacks from Republicans, appeared in a new video advocating on behalf of Justice Department employees who were fired or forced out by the Trump administration.
The video, published Wednesday, comes as Mr. Smith has ended his self-imposed silence since resigning from his position days before Mr. Trump returned to office. In recent weeks, he has begun to speak out publicly on the administration’s purge of prosecutors and agents who worked on cases related to Mr. Trump, and on the president’s effort to punish his perceived enemies.
The new video was released by Justice Connection, a group of former department employees who provide legal services and counseling to the agency’s work force. The group has been highly critical of the Trump administration’s firings of prosecutors and agents, often without cause, or for the expressed reason that they worked on cases related to Mr. Trump.
By appearing in the video, Mr. Smith seems to be embracing that critique of the administration.
“Justice Connection supported my team when they were unjustly fired,” Mr. Smith says in the video, which features more than a dozen former department employees.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The video includes clips of the president and some of his senior officials talking about their plans to fire civil servants.
A separate video published this week featured an interview with Mr. Smith in which he sharply criticized the current direction of the Justice Department and its treatment of those who once worked for him.
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.”
Last month, he gave a lecture to law students and professors at George Mason University in Virginia. “What I see happening at the Department of Justice today saddens me and angers me — selfless public servants fired for doing their job, the government using the vast powers of the criminal justice system to target citizens for exercising their constitutional rights,” he said.
The administration’s dismissals of employees over Trump cases have continued into this month. Last week, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, fired two agents who worked on the investigation into Mr. Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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