CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said Tuesday that former special counsel Jack Smith displayed strong emotions in his final report on prosecuting President-elect Donald Trump.
Smith wrote that he stands “fully behind” prosecuting President-elect Donald Trump in relation to his alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, and claimed the president-elect would have been convicted if he had not won the 2024 election. Honig said that the introductory letter of the report is unusually filled with an “intense” defense of Smith’s team.
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“The part that’s unusual, though, is that four page introductory letter … it is an intense, almost emotional defense of Jack Smith’s team,” Honig said. “Now it’s normal to see [a] special counsel say in a couple sentences, ‘my team was very hard working and had high integrity, it was not political.’ But he goes on a rant, he quotes John Adams, he quotes former attorneys general, and he says the criticism of him as laughable. And I suppose someone could look at that as an important and necessary example of Jack Smith standing up for his team. On the other hand, though, it’s hard to read that and think that everything that follows is completely separate from emotion and is completely workman-like and has nothing to do with his personal feelings.”
In his report, Smith stated that his team’s investigation of Trump was “consistent with [the Department of Justice’s] traditions and integrity.” He quoted former President John Adams and former Attorney General Edward H. Levi to argue that Trump is not “above the law” and thus the case against him was justified.
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“Our work rested upon the fundamental value of our democracy that we exist as ‘a government of laws, and not of men.’ John Adams, Novanglus, No. VII at 84 (Mar. 6, 1775),” Smith wrote. “In making decisions as Special Counsel, I considered as a first principle whether our actions would contribute to upholding the rule of law, and acted accordingly …That is also why, in my decision-making, I heeded the imperative that “[n]o man in this country is so high that he is above the law,” United States v. Lee, I06 U.S. 196,220 (1882).”
The former special counsel, who resigned from the Department of Justice (DOJ) Sunday, said he found notable evidence that Trump engaged in “unprecedented efforts to unlawfully retain power” following the 2020 election.
“While I relied greatly on the counsel, judgment, and advice of our team, I want it to be clear that the ultimate decision to bring charges against Mr. Trump was mine. It is a decision I stand behind fully,” Smith’s report continued. “To have done otherwise on the facts developed during our work would have been to shirk my duties as a prosecutor and a public servant. After nearly 30 years of public service, that is a choice I could not abide.”
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Smith indicted Trump on four counts over his alleged election interference attempts in August 2023. He dismissed the case on Nov. 25 following Trump’s election victory in order to uphold the DOJ’s long-standing precedent of not indicting a sitting president.
The special counsel charged Trump in a separate case over his alleged unlawful storage of classified material at Mar-a-Lago. Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case in July by arguing that the appointment of a special counsel is unconstitutional.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.