Trump indictment: Who is Jack Smith? Special Counsel who investigated Trump classified documents case

In November last year, veteran prosecutor Jack Smith was appointed to investigate former Donald Trump’s case in which he has been charged on seven counts. Smith, a hard-driving prosecutor who has taken high-stakes cases in the past against politicians, was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to oversee two investigations against Trump.

Smith looked into two investigations against the former US president: one, into his attempt to overturn the 2020 election that led up to the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol, and the other into Trump’s retention of classified materials at his residence in Florida.

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While announcing the appointment of Smith, Attorney Garland said he made “the right choice to complete these matters in an evenhanded and urgent manner”. Smith had been serving as the top prosecutor investigating war crimes in Kosovo at the International Criminal Court in Hague.

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Many Republicans and Trump himself have accused the Justice Department of pursuing a politically motivated investigation which is intended to destroy Trump’s chances of retaking the White House. But department officials say,Smith, 54, is intent on conducting a fair investigation in secrecy. Smith even refused to acknowledge the questions of reporters who approached him outside his office in Washington.

Smith and his team investigated the case for over seven-month and interviewed former White House officials, Trump aides and Florida-based Mar-a-Lago staff in the classified documents investigation before handing down the decision on Thursday.

Jack Smith: A career prosecutor

Born in June 1969, Smith grew up in Clay, New York. He graduated from the State University of New York at Oneonta in 1991 before attending Harvard Law School.

In the 1990s, Smith was a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and soon moved to a similar job at the US attorney’s office in Brooklyn. Over the next decade, he rose to a series of supervisory positions, including chief of criminal litigation, overseeing dozens of prosecutors pursuing cases involving gangs, violent crime, financial fraud and public corruption.

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In 2018, he was appointed chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Garland’s announcement of appointing Smith as special prosecutor overseeing the two federal investigations came days after Trump announced he would again run for president.

What didSmith’s investigation reveal?

Recently, Smith has seen meeting with Justice Department lawyers and members of Trump’s defence team, in a sign he would soon hand down a decision. Smith’s team then informed Trump’s lawyers in a letter that the ex-president was a target of the investigation of the documents, as per multiple reports.

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However, Trump had maintained he was unaware of the indictment.

“No one has told me I’m being indicted, and I shouldn’t be because I’ve done NOTHING wrong,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

But Smith’s investigation proves otherwise. CNN first reported that among the evidence collected by Smith and his team is an audio tape where Trump says he kept a classified document detailing a potential attack on Iran.

(With inputs from agencies)

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