Jack Smith criticizes Trump for attack on rule of law

Former special counsel Jack Smith on Thursday said that under President Donald Trump, “We are facing an attack on the rule of law,” and that he is “very concerned about what’s going to happen next election”

Smith also said that a potential indictment of him by the Department of Justice “could happen” given Trump’s animus toward him for prosecuting the president in two separate criminal cases before Trump returned to the White House.

Smith told Nicolle Wallace on MS NOW’s “Deadline: White House” that “it angers me” to see public servants “demonized for doing their jobs” by the Trump administration for their work on cases seen as hostile to the president and his allies or for other reasons.

“I think it’s really important that we stand up for them and let them know that there are a lot of people out there who back them and who are with them, and that’s not just the people who have been who’ve been targeted and fired for no reason for doing their jobs,” he said.

Smith’s interview was his first with a media outlet since he resigned as special counsel 10 days before Trump was sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2025.

A week after Trump was inaugurated, the DOJ fired four career prosecutors, and others who worked with Smith on the prosecutions of Trump.

“I think we are facing an attack on the rule of law that is different in kind and scope to anything I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Smith told Wallace.

He referred to “retribution prosecutions,” which have included indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James by the DOJ.

“One of the problems right today, besides the retribution prosecutions, is that the Justice Department can’t do its job, right?” Smith said.

“If you go to court … and the judges don’t trust you, you can’t do the basic things that you need to do to represent the American people in court,” he said. “And we have seen judges across the country say they can’t trust prosecutors anymore.”

Smith said that young people whom he has spoken with are not as interested as they previously had been in working for the DOJ.

“I tell people, when I go to these universities and to law schools, don’t give up on it,” he said.

Smith, who had been a longtime federal prosecutor, was tapped by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022 as special counsel for two criminal investigations of Trump, who just days earlier had announced he would seek a second non-consecutive term in the White House.

The special counsel later obtained two grand jury indictments criminally charging Trump.

In one case, Trump was accused of crimes related to his efforts to reverse his loss in the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden, whose confirmation of victory by Congress was disrupted on Jan. 6, 2021, by an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.

Trump for years has continued to falsely claim that he won that election but was swindled out of the victory because of widespread ballot fraud.

In the second case, Trump was charged with crimes in connection with his retention of classified government documents after leaving the White House in January 2021, and with efforts to prevent officials from recovering them from his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

Trump denied wrongdoing in both cases.

A Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, in July 2024 dismissed the classified documents case after ruling that Smith had not been legally appointed special counsel.

The DOJ appealed that ruling, but dropped that effort and also dismissed the election interference case after Trump was elected president that fall, because of a department policy barring sitting presidents from being prosecuted.