Jack Smith Breaks Silence on Trump in First Public Speech

0:00Ben Meiselas:Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills. But it turns out, that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Well, he's back and he's not holding back.

0:33Ben Meiselas:Former special counsel Jack Smith made his first public appearance since Donald Trump has taken office and has destroyed the Department of Justice. Frankly, it's really the first public appearance we've seen of special counsel Jack Smith really ever in this type of forum. So he spoke before the UCL Faculty of Laws, which is the law school at the University College of London. And it's in connection with the UCL Global Center for Democratic Constitutionalism. He was interviewed by former prosecutor, you know him, Andrew Weissman, who did a good job with this interview. And special counsel Jack Smith was not holding back.

1:17Ben Meiselas:Now, the full interview lasted over an hour. I went through it for you. It's actually nearly two hours, and I took the major highlights for you that I think will provide you with a comprehensive overview of all of the key portions of this lecture, if you will, of this Q &A session between special counsel or former special counsel Jack Smith being questioned by Andrew Weissman. He's referred to as the state of the United States, a conversation with Jack Smith. Jack Smith talks about his cases against Donald Trump. He talks about the Supreme Court ruling that ultimately gave Donald Trump absolute immunity.

2:01Ben Meiselas:Special counsel Jack Smith or former special counsel Jack Smith addresses what he sees with this kind of farcical prosecution of James Comey and Hibbs observation. He talks about what it means to be a good prosecutor, what the role of the DOJ actually means, what it means to be a non-political public servant. This was powerful. I'm going to admit it also brought a tear to my eye just seeing what kind of normalcy, what competent prosecutorial ethics looks like. This is why I went to law school at Georgetown Law because I love the law and I care deeply about law and order. And when you see it here for yourself, I think that you will see why former special counsel Jack Smith was the right guy, right person for the job, and also how abysmal the Supreme Court decision granting Donald Trump absolute immunity was, and how far the DOJ has lost its connection to what it's supposed to be, how Trump has destroyed it.

3:08Ben Meiselas:So let's go through these critical clips. So here I think is the most important portion of the interview. It's about an hour and eight minutes or so into the interview to about an hour and 19 minutes in where Andrew Weissman asks Special Counsel Jack Smith about his view of what Donald Trump has done to the DOJ. And they pivot to talk about some of the current cases that Donald Trump is doing and also Trump's vindictive firing of DOJ career prosecutors. Here, play this clip. But given what we have seen in the Department of Justice under the second Trump administration, and given your history as a state prosecutor, federal prosecutor, working under Republican and Democratic administrations, and your work at the ICC, sort of what's your sort of diagnosis of what is happening to the department?

4:14Ben Meiselas:And similar to the question I had about what happens when the next president comes in and this sort of tit for tat concern, are we also at the Department of Justice leading to a spiral where let's assume we have a democratic administration at some point and what do they do then do they try and clean house and does it become a tit for tat where we we essentially no longer have a civil service in in the federal government which is supposed to sort of eradicate this issue of why we only hire democrats we only hire republicans so how do sort of see where we are and the prospect of what's going to happen?

5:00You're right about the compound questions, by the way. That's definitely, yeah. Let me, let me break that down and take it in, I think, reverse order. Yes, I think the attacks on public servants, particularly nonpartisan public servants, I think it has a cost for our country that is incalculable. And I think that we, it's hard to communicate to folks how much that is going to cost us. 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. And that's happening throughout the department. It makes me concerned.

5:35And, you know, this idea that if you didn't vote for the current person in office, you can't be trusted to be a government employee. In the United States, we tried that. It's called a patronage system. where you got the job because of who you supported, not because you knew how to do the job, the competence part. And we know that it's rife with corruption and it's rife with incompetence. And so that makes me very concerned going forward. But in terms of what I see now, and it goes back to the analysis that I gave you before, if you are driven to achieve certain outcomes, no matter what, that's a real problem.

6:15That's not something I saw in the Department of Justice, and I think it bears mentioning, you know, I worked in the department for years, Republican, Democrat, Republican. I worked in the, I was the acting U.S. attorney in the first Trump administration in Tennessee. Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on. This case in New York City where the case against the mayor was dismissed in the hopes that he would support the president's political agenda. I mean, just so you know, nothing like it has ever happened that I've ever heard of. Recently, we had this issue of like, I guess it was people in the Defense Department using signal to communicate with each other about war plans, clearly classified information.

7:05I can tell you, Andrew will tell you, there is no administration, Republican or Democrat, that does not open an investigation in that situation. Nothing. Where the lives of servicemen are put at risk, zero. Never happens. So again, when we get to a place where the outcome is what matters and not the process, and the last one I'll just throw out is this latest prosecution of the former director of the FBI. You know, there's a process to secure an indictment. There's a process of predication, having some evidence before you do that. Here, and again, I only know what I see myself in the media, but the career prosecutors, the apolitical prosecutors who analyzed this said there wasn't a case.

7:48And so they brought somebody in who had never been a criminal prosecutor on day's notice to secure an indictment a day before the statute of limitations ended. That just reeks of lack of process.

8:01Ben Meiselas:I'll add to that the Trump-selected U.S. attorney resigned over this. So not just the career people, but also an actual presidential selection resigned. And if you listened to the president, was fired, but in other way was pressured out to not bring the case. Yeah. And I just want to be clear too. I don't see, and I think a lot of Americans do not see this as a political issue. Process shouldn't be a political issue, right? Like if there's rules in the department about how to bring a case, follow those rules. You can't say, I want this outcome let me throw the rules out. That's why, frankly, you see all these conflicts between the career apolitical prosecutors I worked with, because they're being asked to do things that they think are wrong.

8:52And because they're not political people, they're not going to do them. And I think that explains why you've seen the resignations, you've seen people leave the department. It's not because they're enemies of one administration or the next. They've worked through decades for different administrations. It's just they've been doing things apolitically forever. And when they're told, no, you got to get this outcome no matter what, that is so contrary to how we were all raised as prosecutors. I think that's been the center of all the conflict.

9:20Ben Meiselas:So I'm going to end with a couple sort of questions about sort of more personal ones. So sort of obviously in the United States, there's been a lot of vilification, but particularly of you and your team. And if you don't want to talk about yourself, just sort of what have the consequences been in terms of just the personal lives of either yourself or your team in terms of how they have to live, whether they can find jobs? You know, what is it like to have to live through that kind of harassment for what seemingly is just doing your job? Yeah. I mean, what's interesting for me is, you know, I live my life in a way where I was not seeking to be someone whose name people knew, right?

10:09I was a prosecutor, a public servant, and having done this job, now I'm this guy where people interact with me in a way that they didn't before. But I'm really just like one of many sort of public servants who want to do their job, want to do the right thing, want to be public servants. And so, yes, if you don't know, everybody who worked on my team was fired, not just the lawyers, but the administrative staff as well. I think these are people who have spent their careers sacrificing for the communities they want to protect for our country. I'm really upset that people like that not only are being vilified, but that it's hard to get their stories out of who they are.

10:54Because I think the way we communicate with each other right now, it's very hard to tell a narrative. Because if you saw the narratives of some of these people. I mean, they're just briefly, there's an agent who worked on our case, who served our country overseas, multiple combat tours, decades as an FBI agent, fired days after his wife died of cancer. People hear these stories. No one's going to think that's okay.

11:23Ben Meiselas:So yeah, I think that's real. The reporting on that is the senior career FBI people try to get Kash Patel, the FBI director, to put off the decision given his personal circumstances and failed. And this most senior person at the FBI making that plea was then fired. Yeah. I mean, these are people, lawyers aside, these are people who put their lives on the line. And for them to be fired for stuff like this, I just don't see how anyone can hear those stories and not be moved by it. And then have people sort of landed on their feet or has it been a struggle? Obviously, I think people know there's been all sorts of executive orders targeting law firms.

12:15Ben Meiselas:There's been actions targeting people, targeting companies, and a chilling effect as a result of that. And to what extent has that sort of affected people on your team in terms of their lives going forward? Yeah, well, the good thing for the folks on my team is they're excellent lawyers. And they are people who are really good at their profession. There is a chilling effect out there. And there's a lot of bad in it. The good, I will say, is we are living in a moment where you get to find out who people are. You get to find out what institutions stand for or companies or law firms. And so I think it's been revealing for all of us about the different ways things have gone there.

12:58I think the folks on my team in the long run will be fine because they're good people. And I believe that they're going to have good outcomes. But the stuff their families have had to go through as a result of this, again, if you knew the stories of these people, nobody would think that's okay.

13:13Ben Meiselas:Any final thoughts that you have for our audience about sort of the rule of law, thinking about what we're experiencing in the United States and how you sort of think about it, having seen sort of the rule of law globally? Yeah. So, you know, I think of public service as a privilege. And my life has been so, It's been so great to live the life I had as a public servant. Not only the things I've got to do, the things I've got to be a part of, but the people I've got to work with. And when I talk to young people a lot today, I see people concerned about a career in public service or having second thoughts about a career in public service because of the moment we're in.

14:00And my message would be you should double down on that. You may have to find a different way to serve the public than you planned. but it's such a privilege. It's such a good way to spend your days and live your life. And I think having something hard to struggle at is one of the best things you could possibly have in your life. And so I think we're in a moment now where people have to think about what matters to them. And if they believe in things like the rule of law, they believe in democracy, if they're blocked in helping the way that they thought they could help, they need to take that commitment and find another way to be part of the solution.

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15:40Ben Meiselas:Now, special counsel Jack Smith then addresses the Supreme Court's ruling that gave Donald Trump absolute immunity for official acts. Watch how Comey describes it, very methodically, very calm. Here play this clip. So the first thing to talk about is just the decision generally. we argued for a different outcome. So obviously I was disappointed in the outcome. But I think a really important thing to understand here is, while I didn't agree, and I'll talk in a minute about the reasoning, I didn't agree with it, we followed it. There was never a question that we were going to follow the law as the Supreme Court said the law now was.

16:19And I think that's really important to understand because I think once we get in a position where we start talking about maybe not following court opinions we don't like, we are lost in terms of the rule of law. And so the reasoning, I very much agreed with the reasoning and the dissent in that opinion, more than the majority, but that was the law. In terms of that particular point, I would say two things. First, if you looked, and we have this if you're interested in it, it's in the final report that I wrote with my team, that how you can think about these issues is on a spectrum. If you look at how the district court, the appellate court, and then the Supreme Court thought about these things, and then the dissent and the majority in the Supreme Court.

17:01There were rule of law considerations, the things we're talking about tonight, and then there were also considerations of giving the executive enough latitude to act, and I think the world was boldly and fearlessly, that the executive would be able to lead the nation. The district Court and the Appellate Court and the dissent strongly weighted the rule of law considerations. The majority opinion strongly weighted the other considerations and, to your point, brought up the scenario of, well, if you do this, then there's going to be this response. My view on that is a couple of things. One, I think if you do that, it's tantamount to saying you can never prosecute powerful high officials because they'll always just there could always be a concern that they'll stay in power and then come after people.

17:54The problem is not prosecuting high officials who did something wrong when you do it according to the processes of law in your country. It's the retaliation. That's the problem. And that's the thing that we should be preventing. and also, you know, in the history of our country, what they're talking about when we've done that, it hasn't happened in the past. And so I disagree with that. But again, that's the reasoning behind the opinion, the ultimate opinion. The law is what it now is in terms of official acts being immune. And that's something that we have to follow.

18:27Ben Meiselas:Then you have special counsel Jack Smith Talk about a little bit more about James Comey and about just this idea of show trials and historically what we've seen in dictatorships with show trials. Here, play this clip. We are having this conversation on the day of the arraignment of the former FBI director, James Comey, in the Eastern District of Virginia with, you know, many procedural irregularities. You also mentioned that in addition to process, you mentioned transparency as something else that you think about in differentiating sort of a righteous prosecution and transparency. Could you talk about sort of what you mean by that?

19:13Sure. And again, like take the Navalny trial. We know or trials. We know that whenever he was going to offer a defense, they decided to not have those in public and not have the public access to it. Same thing, you know, and I should be clear. A lot of times in a prosecution, if there's sensitive information or the protection of witnesses, you can't make everything public if you're going to also, say, protect witnesses or protect sensitive information. But the goal should be to make as much of it public as possible and make your reasons for doing things as public as possible. I think when people don't start, don't understand what the courts are doing and don't understand what prosecutors are doing, that's when distrust happens.

19:56I mean, another way I think of it is if we want trust in our government institutions, it comes down to three things. And this is I'll put it in the lens of a prosecutor, which is what I know. One, you have to be competent at what you do. You have to know how to do it. You have to have experience at it and talent at it. You have to be someone who actually knows the rules of your profession. The second is you have to have integrity. You have to be a truth teller and someone who can be trusted to do things for the right reasons. But the third, and the third one's often the hardest, is you need to be able to communicate one and two to the public.

20:31You need to be able to let the public know that you're a truth teller and you actually know how to do this. When you don't have a transparent process, it's impossible to do those things. It's impossible to, whether you're competent or not, it's impossible to show that. And if you are competent, you shouldn't be afraid of a transparent process.

20:50Ben Meiselas:Special counsel Jack Smith then addresses what he views it means to be a good prosecutor, what he learned. Here play this clip. I was taught as a young prosecutor, no fear, no favor. I was taught as a young prosecutor, you do the right things, you do it the right way and for the right reasons. And when I was a young assistant district attorney in Manhattan, I thought that's what you were taught at the Manhattan DA's office. When I got to the Eastern District of New York, I was like, wow, that's the same philosophy here. We do it the same way. When I got to the ICC and what I tried to imbue on the people in my office when I was running the last office overseas was those same sort of principles.

21:33And what I found is that public servants who want to be good public servants, wherever they are, that those are really guiding principles. If you do those three things, do the right thing, do it the right way and do it for the right reasons. If you're hitting those marks, you're going to be okay as a prosecutor.

21:48Ben Meiselas:He then talks about how he was trained, how prosecutors should not be political, how he's worked in Democratic administrations, Republican administrations. He's never asked people, what's your political view? What's your political view? And he then, you know, basically without saying it, draws that contrast to what we're seeing today under the Trump regime. Play this clip. Maybe to be more pointed, given the environment that we're in in the United States, how, if at all, does their political views or even their party affiliation factor in or not factor in to your decision about who you would bring on?

22:31Yeah, so most of the people who ended up working on this investigation from the beginning to the end when I was special counsel were people who were already actually working on the investigations when I took over. They were working on the separate cases. I did bring in a few people to assist. Those people I brought in were all former, long-time former federal prosecutors who had worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations over and over again. And one of the topics I really like to talk with folks about, because I don't think it's talked about enough, is the just incredible high level of integrity and competence and willingness to sacrifice of the people who do this work.

23:11And I'm talking about the people I worked with in the special counsel's office. But the Department of Justice in the U.S., the FBI, are filled with people like this. And these are people who are not self-promoters. They do not like to tell their own story. They cannot start a sentence with I. They start that with we. These are team players who don't want anything but to do good in the world. They're not interested in politics. and I get very concerned when I see how easy it is to demonize these people for political ends when these are the very sort of people I think we should be celebrating. The people on my special counsel team were like that.

23:51The idea that politics played a role and who worked on that case or who got chosen is ludicrous and Andrew you know and this is another thing that I think if you're not inside the U.S. Department of Justice. The idea that politics would play a role in big cases like this, it's absolutely ludicrous and it's totally contrary to my experience as a prosecutor from, again, the time I was a junior prosecutor. When I started out, if I had told my boss at the DA's office, hey, I've got this case and I was going to bring it, but I just found out that the guy is a friend of the DA, so maybe we could find a way not to bring it.

24:32Or if I said, hey, I wasn't going to bring this case because it's not a legitimate case on the facts and law, but I saw that he was an enemy of the DA and maybe we shouldn't bring it. My boss, my first boss, he would toss me out a window, right? Tossed me out a window. When I was the chief of the public integrity section, we were doing the highest profile corruption cases around the country. I had no idea of the politics of people who work for me because it was entirely irrelevant. to our work. And that was the same when I was in Brooklyn, New York. It was the same when I was in Tennessee. And it's one of those things that I think sometimes you hear what's in the news.

25:08If you talk to anybody in the department who's been there for decades, that's just not even close to what that work is like. And I don't think that there's enough people out there saying that because the people who do that, they don't want to be out front talking about those things, putting themselves sort of in the limelight. They just want to do good work. And so the people on my team were similar to what I saw throughout the department during my career, apolitical people who wanted to do the right thing and do public service.

25:37Ben Meiselas:More from special counsel Jack Smith addressing why he brought the case involving Trump's theft of classified documents that were found at Mar-a-Lago. Why did you bring that case in Florida when it eventually got assigned to Judge Eileen Cannon play this clip. Two things here. One is kind of the I just wanted to address the note you said about, you know, some people criticize things. I think one thing and it kind of will explain a lot of my thinking about these things. 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.