Left: Former special counsel Jack Smith speaks on Oct. 8, 2025, at the UCL Centre for Global Constitutional Democracy (UCL Laws/YouTube). Right: President Donald Trump speaks to a gathering of top U.S. military commanders at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2025, in Quantico, Va. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
Jack Smith sat for a rare interview last week, in which he addressed anything from international courts, to Stalinist show trials, to prosecutorial transparency and cameras in U.S. federal courts, to the basic purpose of the special counsel. But he also called it “absolutely ludicrous” for President Donald Trump and his allies to say his Jan. 6 and Mar-a-Lago probes were a political hatchet job.
The “State of the United States” conversation with former Robert Mueller top lieutenant Andrew Weissmann at the UCL Centre for Global Constitutional Democracy unfolded on Oct. 8 and was posted to YouTube on Tuesday.
After the 33-minute mark, Weissmann shifted the discussion to Smith”s special counsel probe of Trump.
“My position was very similar in a lot of ways to the special prosecutor in the Watergate case,” Smith said, pushing back on the notion that he was freestyling on his own and without oversight in bringing charges against Trump. “Usually a special counsel is appointed when there is either a conflict of interest or another extraordinary situation where the attorney general determines that it’s in the public interest […] to independently and objectively investigate whatever the particular assignment is […] and come to a conclusion about should a case be brought.”
“I can’t just do what I want, I have to do it within the rules of the Department [of Justice],” Smith added, pointing out that he needed to get approval from the Public Integrity Section before pursuing election fraud charges.
Smith also offered a full-throated defense of the prosecutors on his team, most of whom were working on the investigations before he was appointed as special counsel.
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“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,” he said. “The people on my special counsel team were like that. The idea that politics played a role in who worked on that case or who got chosen is ludicrous.”
“The idea that politics would play a role in big cases like this is absolutely ludicrous and it’s totally contrary to my experience as a prosecutor, from, again, the time I was a junior prosecutor,” Smith added.
Smith said his first boss would have “tossed [him] out a window” had he gone to him with political considerations about whether or not to bring a case.
As for the Mar-a-Lago case, Smith said “we had tons of evidence” that Trump willfully withheld classified documents and obstructed their return, unlike in special counsel Robert Hur’s probe of then-President Joe Biden.
“And the obstructive evidence, publicly saying these are my documents, or things like that, and I can keep them. The evidence to not give the documents back when the government even tried to get them back before there was a criminal investigation, those sort of things […] that helps prove willfulness,” Smith said, noting that there was much more “willfulness” evidence and about four times as many documents allegedly in Trump’s possession than there were in Biden’s possession.
Smith, famously appointed by Biden’s U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and role in Jan. 6, ran into a buzzsaw in Florida that saw his appointment invalidated by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, in July 2024.
After Trump was elected once again as president, the Jan. 6 case disappeared in much the same way, and mass pardons for his supporters followed.
Smith’s remarks come at a time when Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee seek his testimony about his “team’s partisan and politically motivated prosecutions of President Donald J. Trump and his co-defendants.”
Watch the full interview here:
