Former Special Prosecutor Jack Smith speaks with MS NOW.
Provided by: MS NOW
Former special counsel Jack Smith said Thursday that under President Donald Trump “we are facing an assault on the rule of law” and that he is “very concerned about what will happen in the next election.”
Smith also said the possibility of his own indictment by the Justice Department was “a possibility” given Trump’s hostility to indicting the president in two separate criminal cases before he returned to the White House.
Smith told Nicole Wallace on MS NOW’s “Deadline: The White House” that it’s infuriating to see public servants “demonized for doing their jobs” by the Trump administration for incidents and other reasons deemed hostile to the president and his allies.
“I think it’s really important to let them know that there are a lot of people out there who are going to advocate for them and support them and work with them. They’re not just people who have been targeted and fired for no reason to work,” he said.
Mr. Smith’s interview was Mr. Trump’s first media interview since he resigned as special counsel on January 20, 2025, 10 days before Mr. Trump was inaugurated as president.
A week after Trump took office, the Justice Department fired four career prosecutors and others who worked with Smith to prosecute Trump.
“I think we are facing an attack on the rule of law, and this is unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime in type and scope,” Smith told Wallace.
He cited “retaliatory prosecutions,” including the Justice Department’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey and New York State Attorney General Letitia James.
“One of the problems today, other than retaliatory prosecutions, is that the Department of Justice is not up to its job, right?” Smith said.
“If you go to court and the judge doesn’t trust you, you won’t be able to do the basic things you need to do to represent the American people in court,” he said. “And we’ve seen judges across the country say they can’t trust prosecutors anymore.”
Smith said the young people he has talked to are not as interested in working for the Justice Department as they used to be.
“I tell people when you go to these universities and law schools, don’t give up,” he said.
Smith, a longtime federal prosecutor, was selected by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022 to serve as special counsel for Trump’s two criminal investigations, just days before Trump announced he would seek a second non-consecutive term in the White House.
The special counsel subsequently obtained two grand jury indictments charging Trump with criminal charges.
In one case, Trump was charged with crimes related to his efforts to reverse his loss to former President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, but the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters prevented Congress from confirming his victory.
Trump has falsely claimed for years that he won the election but that it was stolen from him due to widespread voter fraud.
In the second case, Trump was charged with storing classified government documents after leaving the White House in January 2021 and related to preventing authorities from recovering classified documents from his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump has denied wrongdoing in both cases.
In July 2024, Trump-appointed judge Eileen Cannon ruled that Smith was not legally appointed special counsel and dismissed the classified documents lawsuit.
The Justice Department appealed the ruling, but dropped its efforts, and after Mr. Trump was elected president in the fall of that year, it also dismissed the election interference lawsuit, citing the department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.
