Former special counsel reveals 'tons of evidence' on Trump
The New Republic reports former special counsel Jack Smith was building a significant case on President Donald Trump’s illegal possession of classified documents and his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
“One of the major differences between the [Biden and Trump] cases is the obstructive conduct in the case that I investigated … to prove illegal possession of classified documents, you need to show that the defendant possesses the documents willfully,” Smith said in an interview at the University College London Centre for Global Constitutional Democracy. “That means [Trump] knew what he was doing was wrong. We had tons of evidence of willfulness.”
Federal investigators charged Trump with keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home after leaving the White House, resulting in a 40-felony count indictment against the president in 2023. Smith told UCL Law host Andrew Weissmann that the evidence was piling up when Trump won the election in 2024 and both the stolen documents case and the Jan’ 6 case were dropped.
Trump, he said, made it easy to determine willfulness in the documents case.
“The government even tried to get [the documents] back before there was a criminal investigation, and then after the investigation started, [Trump] still [refused] to give them back, and then [tried] to obstruct the investigation,” Smith said.
Additionally, Smith slammed Trump’s attempt to frame his prosecution as political.
“The idea that politics played a role in who worked in that case was ludicrous,” Smith told Weissman. “ … When I started out as a junior prosecutor, if I told my boss at the DA’s office ‘hey, I got this case, and I was gonna bring it but I found out this guy is a friend of the DA, so maybe we shouldn’t bring it,’ or ‘I got this case … that’s not a legitimate case on the facts and law but I saw he was an enemy of the DA and I thought we should bring it,’ my first boss would’ve tossed me out a window.”
The New Republic reports Trump will not likely suffer any consequence for his crimes, even as he hurls insults at Smith and targets prosecutors who dared to investigate him with political prosecution, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.
