Jack Smith - the special counsel tasked with investigating former president Donald Trump's possible mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Club and residence and key aspects of the Jan. 6 probe - is a longtime federal prosecutor and seasoned investigator.
"Mr. Smith will begin his work as special counsel immediately and will be returning to the United States from the Hague," Garland said Friday afternoon in announcing his choice of Smith, who is currently serving as a war crimes prosecutor with the International Criminal Court. "Throughout his career, Jack Smith has built a reputation as an impartial and determined prosecutor who leads teams with energy and focus to follow the facts wherever they lead."
In a statement Friday, Smith promised to conduct the investigations and any possible prosecutions "independently."
"The pace of the investigations will not pause or flag under my watch. I will exercise independent judgment and will move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate," he said.
Smith's career as a prosecutor began in Manhattan in the early 1990s, where he earned a reputation as a hard worker.
"I don't think I was very talented, but you field a lot of groundballs, you're a good shortstop," Smith once told the Associated Press about those early days.
He went on to spend nearly a decade as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn.
Smith was a federal prosecutor on a case in which the defendant, Ronnell Wilson, was sentenced to death for killing two police officers. But a federal appeals court overturned the death sentence in 2010 on grounds that prosecution violated Wilson's constitutional rights by telling a jury that Wilson's refusal to testify during the penalty phase undermined his claims of remorse. Smith had told the jury that Wilson "has an absolute right to go to trial, put the government to its burden of proof, to prove he committed these crimes, but he can't have it both ways," according to a New York Times report at the time. The case continued for years until 2016, when a federal judge ruled that Wilson could not be sentenced to death because he was considered intellectually disabled.
