Repeat bit then continuing your excerpt from: "The Inevitable Indictment of Donald Trump It’s clear to me that Merrick Garland will bring charges against Donald Trump. It’s just a matter of when. By Franklin Foer October 11, 2022, 6 AM ET [...] When Garland returned to the Court of Appeals after his nomination was blocked, he was greeted with an ovation from his colleagues. No doubt it was heartwarming, but the truth was that he was returning to an old routine after having been taunted with the job of his dreams. It would have only been human for his mind to ponder a fresh start."
In the fall of 2020, with polls showing Joe Biden primed to defeat Donald Trump, friends began asking, Would you ever want to be attorney general?
When Garland’s name showed up on the list of Biden’s potential AGs, it was fair to assume that he hoped the job would nudge the Supreme Court debacle out of the first paragraph of his obituary. But Garland told friends that he wanted to return to the Justice Department, where he’d worked as a young lawyer and first found his sense of professional purpose, to restore an institution that he revered. It had been damaged by a succession of Trump appointees, who carried out the policy of separating migrant children from their parents, distorted the findings of Robert Mueller’s investigation, and allegedly brought cases in order to settle the president’s political scores.
As Garland prepared to take the job, he often sounded nostalgic for his first stint at DOJ, in the final years of the Carter administration, when he worked as a special assistant to Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. Nobody thinks of the late ’70s as the height of idealism, but that’s how Garland remembers the time.
In the aftermath of Watergate, he sat by Civiletti’s side as he continued the work of reforming the Justice Department: writing new rules and procedures to prevent another president from ever abusing the institution. They were preserving the rule of law by bubble-wrapping it in norms, so that it would be thoroughly insulated from political pressure.
This June, I visited Garland in his wood-paneled office, one of the cozier rooms in DOJ’s cavernous building. He wore a navy suit that looked as if it had been purchased at Brooks Brothers in 1985. A tray of coffee with demitasses was laid out on a coffee table, but he sipped from a mug.
As Garland spoke about his approach to his job, he asked an aide to pass him a copy of a tattered blue book that was sitting on a side table, Principles of Federal Prosecution, published during his time with Civiletti. He kept extolling the neutrality of the department, how it should never favor friends or penalize foes, how it should only bring cases that persuade juries and survive appeals. “What I’m saying isn’t novel,” he said. “It’s all in here.”
Thumbing through the document, he seemed briefly distracted. I asked him if he’d had anything to do with its publication. “I helped edit it,” he said, and then wistfully recalled his mentors in the department who oversaw its production. It struck me that Garland isn’t just by-the-book. In some profound sense, he is the book.
This unbending fidelity to rules and norms has often looked impotent in the face of the democratic emergency that is Donald Trump. In his quest to avoid the taint of politics, Garland allowed certain Trump-era policies to remain in place. He ordered the DOJ to continue defending Trump against a defamation lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, a writer who accused him of raping her. He has permitted the Special Prosecutor John Durham’s investigation of the origins of Russiagate to persist, despite a raft of Democrats clamoring for him to shut it down. (I should note here that Durham mentioned my reporting on Trump and Russia in court filings, and his lawyers asked witnesses about it in his prosecution of a Clinton campaign lawyer, whom a jury acquitted.) Those flash points created an impression of passivity; instead of rushing to confront the legacy of Trumpism, he seemed to be meekly deferring to it.
It is not difficult to see why anti-Trump partisans could grow frustrated with Garland’s obdurate commitment to the traditions of the department when Trump is so intent on trampling them. His faith in them feels antiquated—and detached from the Democratic Party’s broad reconsideration of norms that were once seen as pillars of the American system. Not so long ago, expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court or eliminating the filibuster seemed like subversive thought experiments. Now they are touted as necessities for preserving majoritarian politics.
But the post-Watergate reforms that Garland wants to defend weren’t aimed at abstract threats. They emerged as responses to very real abuse committed within living memory. And they arguably did an effective job at blunting Donald Trump’s desire to turn the Justice Department into his plaything, even if they couldn’t prevent every transgression. Norms held and prevented nightmare scenarios from unfolding.
These norms may not hold the next time, but that doesn’t obviate their ethical power. No matter how much one fears Trump, the prosecution of a former president can’t be undertaken lightly. The expectation that political enemies will be treated fairly is the basis for the legitimacy of the entire legal system. That’s why Garland’s hand-wringing and fussiness matter. Any indictment he brings against Trump will have survived his scrutiny, which means that it will have cleared a high bar.
Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick takes a meeting with Amy Jeffries (left), counsel to the DAG, and Merrick Garland (right), principal associate DAG, in her office at the Justice Department, in September 1995. (Bill O’Leary / The Washington Post / Getty)
When Garland talks about how he handles complex, emotionally fraught investigations, there’s a historical antecedent that he likes to cite as his formative experience. On the morning of April 19, 1995, the Department of Justice’s leadership learned that a bomb had destroyed much of a massive federal office building in Oklahoma City, ripping off its facade and killing 168 people, including 19 children in the building’s day-care center.
At the time, Garland held a job known as the PADAG, or the principal associate deputy attorney general. It’s a mystifying title, but one of the most prized offices in the department: It afforded him a seat in the attorney general’s morning meeting and access to DOJ’s most closely held secrets. Garland used his privileged position to ask if he could travel to Oklahoma City to oversee the investigation.
Before Garland left, Attorney General Janet Reno pulled him aside. Of all things, she wanted to talk about O. J. Simpson. The football star’s trial was going to be running on a split screen alongside the Oklahoma City investigation. Everything the public was about to witness in a Los Angeles courtroom would make the justice system look like a tawdry joke. She told Garland that his job was to show how the legal system could be the antithesis of that circus.
“I want you to be meticulous,” she told him. “I don’t want to have any chance of losing a conviction. I want this to be picture perfect, so that the public understands what justice is.”
The bombing case triggered a strong emotional reaction across America, particularly those who feared the emergence of right-wing militias. Although much more straightforward than the chaotic events of January 6, the crime ignited a similarly intense desire to quickly punish the perpetrators. But Garland vowed to Reno that he would take the long way around.
Paying strict attention to procedure came naturally to Garland, even when the FBI seemed inclined to take shortcuts. He ordered agents to obtain warrants and subpoenas from courts even when they weren’t unambiguously necessary. In his quest for immaculate justice, his investigators conducted 28,000 interviews.
These decisions arguably made the prosecution’s case harder and certainly delayed the gratification of a conviction. But they also guarded against humiliating slipups that might have provided the basis for an appeal. In the end, Timothy McVeigh’s attempt to overturn his conviction failed and he was executed in 2001. His co-conspirator Terry Nichols was sentenced to life, a sentence that an Appeals court affirmed.
Garland has taken a similarly meticulous approach to Trump. Rather than starting with the offenses of the president himself, the department has devoted its resources to tediously building cases against every gym teacher and accountant who breached the Capitol on January 6, some 900 indictments in total. The volume of cases has risked overtaxing prosecutors—and pushing back the work of building more-complicated cases against Trump’s inner circle.
But what looks like donkeywork is a necessary step in a formulaic approach, a set of prescribed practices that have their own embedded wisdom. As Garland explains it, the department has no choice but to begin with the most “overt crimes,” and slowly build from there. To start with Trump would have reeked of politics—and it would have been bad practice, forgoing all the witnesses and cellphone data collected by starting at the bottom.
By focusing on Trump, Garland’s critics tend to underestimate the importance of the other arms of the January 6 prosecutions. The Justice Department has made an example of the foot soldiers of the insurrection, and has thus deflated attendance at every subsequent “Stop the Steal” rally. Evidence supplied by the minnows who invaded the Capitol helped the Justice Department indict leaders of the Oath Keepers (Elmer Stewart Rhodes) and Proud Boys (Henry “Enrique” Tarrio) on charges of seditious conspiracy, the most meaningful steps that the government has taken to dismantle the nation’s right-wing paramilitaries. (Both men have pleaded not guilty.)
Based on subpoenas and the witnesses seen exiting the grand jury, the department is clearly moving up the ladder, getting ever closer to Trump’s inner circle and to Trump himself. But there comes a moment when the rule book that Garland reveres ceases to provide such clear guidance. That’s the juncture that allows for prosecutorial discretion. In the case of Donald Trump, the prosecutor is Merrick Garland and discretion would allow him to decide that an indictment is simply not worth the social cost, or that the case is strong but not strong enough. Garland’s critics fret that when confronted with this moment, his penchant for caution will take hold.
Over the course of his career, institutions were good to Merrick Garland—and he was good to institutions. He was a true believer in the American system. That’s why he struggled to come to terms with the reality of Mitch McConnell.
For 293 days after Obama announced his selection to fill Scalia’s seat, Garland was trapped in limbo, waiting for Senate Republicans to provide him a fair hearing. The whole world knew that they never would; Garland remained patient. One of his old teachers from Harvard Law School, Laurence Tribe, told me, “What was heartbreaking was to see that the system really wasn’t as good as he hoped it was.”
The human response to McConnell’s brazen tactics was rage. Garland’s wife and daughters certainly channeled that emotion, as did his friends and former clerks. The people around Garland couldn’t contain their fury, but he did. When friends would call to vent, he would try to comfort them, to tamp down their ire. “Don’t feel too sorry for me,” he told them. “I’ve had a great run. Don’t worry.”
Such placidity wasn’t anomalous. He was always the calm one, his friend Jamie Gorelick told me. Ever since college, he had counseled her to not let emotions roil her. Back then, she was enraged that Harvard gave free football tickets to men, not women. After a contentious meeting where she railed against the injustice, he took her aside: “You’re right to be upset, but you shouldn’t be this upset. Over time, this will get fixed.” Gorelick valued his circumspection so highly that she hired him to serve as her deputy in the Clinton Justice Department. Even then, his advice was the same. He encouraged her to put angry letters she wrote in a drawer, until she restored her sense of equilibrium.
This tendency could be described as repression. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had another name for it. He called it the “spiritual discipline against resentment,” a phrase from his theory of political persuasion. He urged victims of injustice to resist the self-defeating instinct to righteously trumpet their own victimhood. That’s not a personal credo for Garland, or anything like it. But with his preternatural self-control and his sense of rectitude, he seems to regard anger, especially on his own behalf, as a dangerous emotion.
Agree all the "if Garland charges Trump' chat angst et al/is sickening. It's politics 'no person is above the law' bs politics-law and order intersection. Mostly all now waste of words. Just hoping Garland is man enough to ignore it all. And since he hasn't moved long before now would like him to hit Trump after the midterms. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170107379
Next Jan. 6 committee hearing will reveal ‘pretty surprising’ new material, Rep. Zoe Lofgren says
Related: What if Trump's conspiracy was way bigger than we know? "Meet Cleta Mitchell. Trump's election fixer. Mitchell is heading a real-time Putinesque, Orbanespue, whichever strongman election-fixer you want to use, American effort to fix American elections. P - "Republicans Paddle Faster to Try to Keep their U.S. Senate Hopes from Sinking" Lawyer Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss Recruits Election Deniers to Watch Over the Vote --- "Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun" https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=167072165 https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=169737199
Published Tue, Oct 11 20226:48 PM EDT Kevin Breuninger @KevinWilliamB
Key Points
* The House Jan. 6 Capitol riot select committee’s next public hearing will reveal new material about former President Donald Trump’s plans as well as how much he knew, Rep. Zoe Lofgren said.
* The hearing was supposed to be held last month but was delayed until Thursday at 1 p.m. ET, with committee leaders citing Hurricane Ian.
* The committee recently interviewed Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., arrives for the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol fifth hearing to present previously unseen material and hear witness testimony in Cannon Building, on Thursday, June 23, 2022.Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
The House Jan. 6 select committee’s next public hearing will reveal new material about former President Donald Trump’s .. https://www.cnbc.com/donald-trump/ .. plans and how much he knew about the Capitol riot, one of the panel’s members said Tuesday.
The committee’s ninth public hearing will touch on the “close ties between people in Trump world and some of these extremist groups,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said in a CNN interview.
But “that’s not the only thing the hearing will be about,” Lofgren said. “We’re going to be going through, really some of what we’ve already found, but augmenting with new material that we’ve discovered through our work throughout this summer.”
That involves focusing on Trump’s intentions, she said, including “what he knew, what he did, what others did.”
“I do think that it will be worth watching,” Lofgren said. “There’s some new material that, you know, I found as we got into it, pretty surprising.”
Thomas was not videotaped during her interview with the committee, Lofgren said over the weekend in an MSNBC interview. It is unclear if Ginni Thomas’ testimony will feature in Thursday’s hearing.
Asked to be more specific about the alleged ties between “Trump world” and the extremist groups, Lofgren said, “Let’s just say that the mob was led by some extremist groups, they plotted in advance what they were going to do, and those individuals were known to people in the Trump orbit.”
[INSERT: DOJ details evidence that Oath Keeper brought explosives to D.C. area "These New Details About the 'Peaceful Tourists' Who Visited the Capitol Are Incredibly Dark "The Conspirators: The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on Jan. 6 "Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun"" https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=169359242]
The committee is investigating the facts and circumstances surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, when a violent mob of then-President Donald Trump .. https://www.cnbc.com/donald-trump/ ’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The insurrection forced lawmakers to flee their chambers and temporarily stopped them from confirming President Joe Biden .. https://www.cnbc.com/joe-biden/ ’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election.
The committee also faces an end-of-the-year deadline to submit a final report to the president and Congress containing its findings. That report will include recommended policy changes to make U.S. elections more secure in the future, Lofgren told CNN on Tuesday.
New moves show Merrick Garland's indictment of Trump is 'inevitable': analysis
"The Inevitable Indictment of Donald Trump It’s clear to me that Merrick Garland will bring charges against Donald Trump. It’s just a matter of when."
No more speculation required.
Related: Third and final installment of "The Inevitable Indictment of Donald Trump [...]...That means Garland has until the late spring of 2023 to bring an indictment that has a chance of culminating in a jury verdict before the change of administration. [...]The excruciating conundrum that Garland faces is also a liberating one. He can’t win politically. He will either antagonize the right or disappoint the left. Whatever he decides, he will become deeply unpopular. He will unavoidably damage the reputation of the institution he loves so dearly with a significant portion of the populace. P -...he’ll decide based on the evidence—and on whether that evidence can persuade a jury. [...]Now we can relax and almost ignore all of the needless chatter about why not - if - and when Trump will finally face his day in an American court. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170173057
;-)
Brad Reed October 11, 2022
New moves show Merrick Garland's indictment of Trump is 'inevitable': analysis
Donald Trump, Merrick Garland (Trump photo by Paul Richards for AFP, Garland photo by Brendan Smialowski for AFP)
After offering a disclosure that he has no personal knowledge about whether Garland plans to indict Trump, he nonetheless thinks that the attorney general is preparing to press charges against him because his dedication to the rule of law leaves him with no choice.
"An indictment would be a signal to Trump, as well as to would-be imitators, that no one is above the law," Foer argues. "This is the principle that has animated Garland’s career, which began as the Justice Department was attempting to reassert its independence, and legitimacy, after the ugly meddling of the Nixon years."
Foer then recounts Garland's career at length, and in particular summarizes ample evidence that Garland is, at heart, an institutionalist who would ideally love to avoid indicting Trump and igniting a political firestorm that could lead to a new wave of political violence.
However, he also argues that Trump's behavior has brought out a pugnaciousness in Garland that he had previously not seen.
"When Trump began to assail the search of Mar-a-Lago, Garland asked the court to unseal the inventory of seized documents, essentially calling out the ex-president’s lies," argues Foer. "Rather than passively watching attacks on FBI agents, whom Trump scurrilously accused of planting evidence, Garland passionately backed the bureau. As Trump’s lawyers have tried to use a sympathetic judge to slow down the department’s investigation, Garland’s lawyers have responded with bluntly dismissive briefs, composed without the least hint of deference."
Foer concludes by noting that while Garland will only indict Trump if he believes there is overwhelming evidence against him, he thinks that bar has been met and that the attorney general will act.
"Every time he’s asked about the former president, he responds, 'No one is above the law,'" he writes. "He clearly gets frustrated that his answer fails to satisfy his doubters. I believe that his indictment of Trump will prove that he means it."
And October 15, 20221:25 AM GMT+11Last Updated 10 hours ago Explainer: Does Trump have to comply with the Jan. 6 committee subpoena? By Andy Sullivan [...]Trump's former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, faces up to two years in prison and a fine of up to $200,000 after being found guilty of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee. He is due to be sentenced on Oct. 21. P - Another former Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, has also been charged with contempt of Congress and faces trial in November. P - Federal prosecutors have opted not to charge two other former Trump aides, Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino, after the House voted to hold them in contempt. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/does-trump-have-comply-with-jan-6-committee-subpoena-2022-10-13/
All your questions answered. What’s a subpoena? What happens if someone fails to comply with the order?
By Perry Stein, Tom Hamburger and Spencer S. Hsu
Updated October 14, 2022 at 2:15 p.m. EDT|Published October 13, 2022 at 6:57 p.m. EDT
Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), center, and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), right, are seen as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing on Capitol Hill on Oct. 13. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Here’s what to know about congressional subpoenas — and both their powers and limitations.
[...]
Can Trump refuse to comply with the subpoena?
Yes. A person who is subpoenaed has an opportunity to not comply. But the decision to disregard a subpoena can have consequences.
So what happens if he does refuse?
Lawmakers could ask the Justice Department to charge Trump with contempt of Congress. Stephen Gillers, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, noted that federal prosecutors may refuse such a request. Alternatively, the department could add contempt to later charges “if it indicts him,” Gillers said.
Contempt of Congress is a rarely used criminal statute meant to ensure that people comply with congressional subpoenas. The case of Stephen K. Bannon, the right-wing podcaster and longtime Trump confidant, provides a road map of what could happen.
No one has been incarcerated for contempt of Congress in more than half a century, since the red-baiting hearings of the Cold War era.
Stanley Brand, a former counsel to the House of Representatives who has represented some of the Jan. 6 witnesses, said it would be legally complicated to enforce a subpoena of a former president.
“There is a very low probability we will ever see it happen,” Brand said. “How do you make a case for needing to do this when you are a legislative body, not a grand jury — though it has been acting like one?”
Has Trump responded to the subpoena vote?
Trump lambasted the work of the committee in a 14-page letter .. shorturl.at/bxJ17 .. made public Friday to its chairman but was silent on whether he would comply with a subpoena demanding testimony and documents.
“Despite very poor television ratings, the Unselect Committee has perpetuated a Show Trial the likes of which this Country has never seen before,” Trump said in the letter to Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.).
The letter, which opened with a claim that the 2020 presidential election was “RIGGED AND STOLEN,” repeated many of Trump’s false claims about voter fraud in various states. Trump claimed he could point out more discrepancies but was constrained by time.
Two Trump advisers said Friday that in the aftermath of the subpoena, the former president said he would like to testify — but his advisers don’t expect him to actually do that.
Can Trump fight the subpoena in court?
In theory, Trump could challenge the subpoena in court, Gillers said. That would trigger a repeat of a legal battle that unfolded again and again in federal courts during his presidency: Can Congress enforce its demands that top executive branch officials — and, in this case, the former president himself — testify before lawmakers?
A fight over a 2019 House Judiciary Committee subpoena of former White House counsel Donald McGahn — considered a star witness in former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election — stretched over two years as he staged legal battles so he didn’t have to testify. An appeals court ruled against the House, and the incoming Biden administration reached a compromise, which required McGahn to transcribe answers to questions behind closed doors.
The Supreme Court sided with Congress and the Biden administration on a similar issue in January, ruling that Trump could not prevent the House committee from obtaining hundreds of pages of his White House’s communications and records leading up to Jan. 6. (More than a dozen witness subpoenaed by the House Jan. 6 committee have pending lawsuits challenging those subpoenas.)
If the courts get involved, how long will it take to get a ruling?
Any legal proceedings that emerge from this subpoena could drag on for months. And that could be a win for Trump. If Republicans take control of the House in January, they will likely dissolve the Jan. 6 committee, rendering the subpoena meaningless, legal experts said.
“If the House flips, the committee will not be revived,” Gillers said. “If the House flips but the Senate does not, the Senate could create a committee to take over the House investigation and reissue the subpoena.”
So does this subpoena have any teeth?
It could, but legal experts warn that it also may end up being more of a symbolic move. Gillers said the subpoena may be the committee’s way of giving Trump a formal opportunity to respond to its work, even if it does not expect Trump to show up.
“I suspect that the committee will not try to enforce the subpoena,” Gillers said. “What it is saying with the subpoena is: ‘Here’s your chance.’”
Josh Dawsey and John Wagner contributed to this report.
Live Updates: Garland Names Special Counsel for Trump Inquiries
"The Inevitable Indictment of Donald Trump It’s clear to me that Merrick Garland will bring charges against Donald Trump. It’s just a matter of when."
Ignore the times here, they're out-of-date.
The attorney general named Jack Smith, the former head of the Justice Department’s public integrity section, to the job just days after former President Donald J. Trump announced that he would seek the White House again in 2024.
Video 1:49 - Attorney General Names Special Counsel in Trump Investigations Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Jack Smith, the former head of the Justice Department’s public integrity section, to oversee two major criminal investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
20 minutes ago Glenn Thrush, Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer
Jack Smith, the special counsel, will take over two inquiries into Trump.
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Friday appointed a special counsel to take over two major criminal investigations involving former President Donald J. Trump, including his role in events leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and his handling of sensitive government documents.
Jack Smith, the former head of the Justice Department’s public integrity section, will oversee the investigation into Mr. Trump’s retention of sensitive government documents at his home in Florida, and key aspects of the separate inquiry into his actions before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, Mr. Garland said during a news conference.
Mr. Garland, who has sought to insulate the department from claims that the investigations into Mr. Trump were motivated by politics, said Mr. Trump’s announcement on Tuesday that he was running for president in 2024, coupled with the possibility President Biden would also run, prompted him to take what he described as an “extraordinary” step.
“Such an appointment underscores the department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters,” Mr. Garland said at a hastily arranged news conference at department headquarters.
“I intend to conduct the assigned investigations, and any prosecutions that may result from them, independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice,” Mr. Smith said in a statement. He vowed that the investigations would move forward expeditiously “to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate.”
Under federal regulations, special counsels like Mr. Smith have greater day-to-day autonomy than ordinary prosecutors but ultimately remain under the attorney general’s supervision and control. Among other things, if Mr. Smith were to eventually decide to seek Mr. Trump’s indictment, Mr. Garland would still have to sign off.
The order appointing Mr. Smith, signed on Friday by Mr. Garland, named Mr. Trump in connection with the documents case. It also authorized the special counsel to “conduct the ongoing investigation into whether any person or entity violated the law” in connection with the “lawful transfer of power” after the 2020 elections.
Mr. Smith, known as Jack, has served as the chief prosecutor in The Hague prosecuting war crimes in Kosovo since 2018. He was not present for the announcement because he recently injured his knee in a biking accident, a department official said.
As a prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, Mr. Smith was known as a confident, charismatic person who did not shy away from difficult or controversial cases, former colleagues of his said.
“Jack is the consummate prosecutor and public servant: intelligent, balanced and fair,” said James McGovern, a partner at Hogan Lovells who worked with Mr. Smith for years at the federal prosecutor’s office in Brooklyn. “I have no idea what his political beliefs are because he’s completely apolitical. He’s committed to doing what is right.”
Special counsels are semi-independent prosecutors who by Justice Department regulations can be appointed for high-level investigations when there can be a conflict of interest, or the appearance of it. They can only be removed if they commit misconduct, and the department must tell Congress if an attorney general overrules some step a special counsel wants to take.
Mr. Smith, a graduate of Harvard Law School, had investigated war crimes for the International Criminal Court and helped prosecute police officers in a police brutality case in New York before taking on the role that most overlaps with his new assignment: running the Justice Department’s public integrity section from 2010 to 2015.
At the time he took it over, the section, which handles government corruption investigations, was reeling from the collapse of a criminal case against former Senator Ted Stevens. In his first few months, the section closed several high-profile investigations into members of Congress without charges. But in an interview that year with The New York Times, Mr. Smith denied that the section had lost its nerve on his watch.
“I understand why the question is asked,” Mr. Smith said. “But if I were the sort of person who could be cowed — ‘I know we should bring this case, I know the person did it, but we could lose, and that will look bad’ — I would find another line of work. I can’t imagine how someone who does what I do or has worked with me could think that.”
His tenure included the prosecution of the former governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, on corruption charges — he was convicted, but the Supreme Court overturned it. It also included the successful prosecution of former Representative Rick Renzi, Republican of Arizona, who in 2013 was sentenced to three years in prison. (Mr. Trump later pardoned Mr. Renzi.)
Mr. Smith then worked for several years as the No. 2 federal prosecutor in Nashville, Tenn., before returning to Europe for another round of working on war crimes cases.
For Mr. Trump, it will be a return to a familiar dynamic. The first half of his term he faced a special counsel investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III into the nature of myriad links between his 2016 campaign and Russia at a time when Moscow was carrying out a covert effort to help him win that election, and into whether Mr. Trump had obstructed justice.
Mr. Trump’s supporters have already accused the Biden-era Justice Department of investigating Mr. Trump for political reasons, and some Republicans have floated the idea of impeaching Mr. Garland if he pursues charges against the former president. That tension will only become more pronounced now that Mr. Trump is a candidate for president again.
The department has “a true conflict of interest, real or perceived,” said Claire Finkelstein, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder of the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law. “Garland won’t be running for president, but his direct boss will be. It would be difficult to put measures in place that would reassure people that the Justice Department was acting with independence on the Trump investigation.”
The political swirl around the investigations of Mr. Trump intensified this week when the Republicans won control of the House.
On Friday, the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Mr. Garland announcing its intention to investigate several keys figures in the Justice Department with roles in the inquiries into Mr. Trump. Among those committee wants to interview, the letter said, were Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney in Washington, who is overseeing the Jan. 6 investigation, and top prosecutors in the department’s national security division, which is taking part in the investigation into Mr. Trump’s handling of documents.
19 minutes ago Maggie Haberman
Trump attacks the appointment of the special counsel: ‘It is so unfair. It is so political.’
Former President Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., earlier this week. Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
Former President Donald J. Trump attacked the appointment of a special counsel to handle investigations related to his efforts to stay in power and his possession of classified documents at his members-only club and residence in Florida.
“I have been going through this for six years — for six years I have been going through this, and I am not going to go through it anymore,” Mr. Trump told Fox News Digital. “And I hope the Republicans have the courage to fight this.”
He went on, “I have been proven innocent for six years on everything — from fake impeachments to Mueller, who found no collusion, and now I have to do it more?”
“It is not acceptable. It is so unfair. It is so political,” Mr. Trump said, adding he would not “partake” in the special counsel inquiry.
54 minutes ago Katie Benner
In a statement issued Friday, the new special counsel, Jack Smith, said that he would “conduct the assigned investigations, and any prosecutions that may result from them, independently and in the best traditions of the Department of Justice.” He said that the investigations would “not pause or flag” under his watch and that he would “move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate.”
1 hour ago Maggie Haberman
Smith was a federal prosecutor in an office that was among the first to investigate a young Donald Trump in the 1970s, on possible fraud charges. It was a roughly six-month investigation and closed without charges. Trump soon after began telling people about his ordeal.
.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
1 hour ago Maggie Haberman
A Trump spokesman responds as we have heard Trump aides respond before: “This is a totally expected political stunt by a feckless, politicized, weaponized Biden Department of Justice.”
1 hour ago Katie Benner
While a prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York, Smith was known as a confident, charismatic person who did not shy away from difficult or controversial cases. “Jack is the consummate prosecutor and public servant: Intelligent, balanced and fair,” said James McGovern, a partner at Hogan Lovells who worked with him for years at the federal prosecutor’s office in Brooklyn. “I have no idea what his political beliefs are because he’s completely apolitical. He’s committed to doing what is right.”
1 hour ago Maggie Haberman
Trump is said to have told some allies that the idea of a special counsel infuriated him, given his experience with the length of the Mueller investigation. He believes it could hang over him for months. Nonetheless, it might make a prosecution more distant.
1 hour ago Maggie Haberman
Trump advisers say his lawyers have made clear to him that declaring a candidacy wouldn’t prevent a possible indictment. But he is also said to be aware he can use the unprecedented circumstances to muddy the waters.
1 hour ago Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage
Who Is Jack Smith, the New Special Counsel?
Jack Smith in 2020 during a hearing in The Hague, where he has been the lead prosecutor at a special court that deals with war crimes during the Kosovo conflict. He ran the Justice Department’s public integrity section from 2010 to 2015. Pool photo by Jerry Lampen
Jack Smith, the Justice Department’s newly appointed special counsel, will come to the task of investigating former President Donald J. Trump with a wealth of experience: He has been prosecuting criminal cases for nearly three decades.
Mr. Smith got his start in the 1990s as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and soon moved to a similar job at the United States Attorney’s office in Brooklyn. There, he served in a number of supervisory positions, according to his Justice Department biography, and worked on an assortment of cases, many involving public corruption.
From 2008 to 2010, Mr. Smith worked as the investigation coordinator in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. In that role, he oversaw high-profile inquiries of foreign government officials and militia members wanted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
Returning to the United States, Mr. Smith served from 2010 to 2015 as chief of the Justice Department’s public integrity section, which investigates politicians and other public figures on corruption allegations.
Two of Mr. Smith’s more notable corruption cases against high-profile political figures had opposite results. His team initially won a conviction against the former Gov. Robert McDonnell of Virginia, a Republican, but the Supreme Court overturned it.
It also won a conviction of former Representative Rick Renzi, Republican of Arizona, who was sentenced to three years in prison. (Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Renzi among a flurry of clemency actions in January 2021, in his last hours as president.)
When Mr. Smith took over the public integrity section, it was reeling from the collapse of a criminal case against former Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. In Mr. Smith’s first few months on the job, the section closed several prominent investigations into members of Congress without charges.
But in an interview that year with The New York Times, Mr. Smith denied that the section on his watch had lost its nerve.
“I understand why the question is asked,” Mr. Smith said at the time. “But if I were the sort of person who could be cowed — ‘I know we should bring this case, I know the person did it, but we could lose, and that will look bad’ — I would find another line of work. I can’t imagine how someone who does what I do or has worked with me could think that.”
A graduate of Harvard Law School, Mr. Smith has also worked in top positions at the United States Attorney’s office for the Middle District of Tennessee in Nashville.
Mr. Smith will take on the role of special counsel after leaving his current position as a specialist prosecutor based in The Hague investigating war crimes. He will remain in the Netherlands for some time, according to the Justice Department, in order to recover from a recent bicycle accident.
A correction was made on Nov. 18, 2022 : An earlier version of this article misstated the political affiliation of a former governor of Virginia. Robert McDonnell was a Republican, not a Democrat.
1 hour ago Katie Benner
Legal experts have said that Trump’s decision to run presents a conflict of interest for the department, real or perceived. Garland’s boss will be running against Trump, and it will be difficult to implement any measures that would reassure people that investigation was not a political attack.
1 hour ago Glenn Thrush
It is notable that Garland has used the term “obstruction” at least twice — the obstruction case, along with possible violations of the Espionage Act, are considered to be the two most likely charges that could be brought against Mr. Trump.
1 hour ago Maggie Haberman
But Garland makes clear that Trump created a conflict he didn’t feel he could ignore.
2 hours ago
Maggie Haberman
That Garland is making the charging call is significant.
2 hours ago Glenn Thrush
Garland said he was “confident” that the appointment of the special counsel would not slow down either investigation — and emphasized that he will ultimately make the decision on whether or not to prosecute.
2 hours ago Michael S. Schmidt
Garland says Jack Smith, the special counsel, will start immediately. But Smith has to get back to the United States first — he has been living and working at The Hague.
2 hours ago Michael S. Schmidt
In regards to the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 investigation, a good way to think of the special counsel is that he will investigate anyone who played a role in trying to overturn the election but was not a rioter on the ground.
2 hours ago Michael D. Shear
White House officials say they had no involvement in the special counsel decision.
President Biden in Washington on Friday.Credit...Sarah Silbiger for The New York Times
Officials at the White House said on Friday that they were “not involved” in the decision by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate former President Donald J. Trump.
Asked whether President Biden or others in the administration were aware of the attorney general’s decision ahead of time, a White House aide noted that the Justice Department makes decisions about criminal investigations independently of the president or his White House staff.
The official referred all questions about the appointment of a special counsel to the Justice Department.
Mr. Trump announced on Tuesday that he is running for president again. Mr. Biden said last week that he “intends” to run in 2024 but would talk with his family before announcing a decision early next year.
When Mr. Trump was president, he repeatedly sought to interfere with his attorney general and other Justice Department officials, harassing them on Twitter and repeatedly pressuring them to do his bidding.
Mr. Biden has made a point to insist that he would reverse those practices and return to the more traditional practice of past presidents, who distanced themselves from criminal investigations being conducted by the department, especially when they involved political figures.
Aides have repeatedly declined to discuss the investigations being conducted by the Justice Department into the former president. That appears unlikely to change now that a special counsel has been appointed.
2 hours ago Michael S. Schmidt
Garland points out the major reasons why he has made this move: Trump has announced that he’s running for president — and the current president, who oversees the department, has indicated he will most likely run again for president.
2 hours ago Michael S. Schmidt
Special counsels were created to put distance between the politics of the moment and the investigative work of the Justice Department. Under the regulations for special counsels, the Justice Department will have to tell Congress about any major investigative moves that the special counsel wanted to take that were overruled by senior department officials. Also, the special counsel can be fired only for cause — essentially, for not doing their job.
2 hours ago
Maggie Haberman While officials are generally mindful of prosecutorial activity within 60 days of an election, grand jury activity was still going on in connection with the documents case.
2 hours ago Maggie Haberman
The special counsel could end up simply relieving Merrick Garland of a charging decision. Or, the special counsel could end up running the investigation for many months into the presidential election, which would be something of a boon to Trump.
2 hours ago Michael S. Schmidt
This special counsel will have a different feel from the investigation conducted by Robert S. Mueller III into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice. In the Mueller investigation, Mr. Trump, as president, could fire Mr. Mueller at any point. That created a massive level of tension between the Justice Department and the White House. And, in another difference from the Mueller investigation, a significant amount of investigative work has already been done by federal authorities.
2 hours ago Glenn Thrush
What is a special counsel?
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and his team have long considered creating a layer of protection for the Justice Department by tapping a special counsel, a veteran prosecutor appointed by Mr. Garland to run the day-to-day investigation. But even with the appointment of a special counsel, any final decisions on whether to charge former President Donald J. Trump would still be made by Mr. Garland and the department’s senior leadership.
Under federal law, a special counsel functions, in essence, as a pop-up U.S. attorney’s office with broad discretion over every aspect of an investigation in “extraordinary circumstances” in which the normal chain of command could be seen as creating a conflict of interest.
An attorney general still has the right to approve or discard a special counsel’s recommendations. But if Mr. Garland were to reject the counsel’s recommendation, he would have to inform Congress, a safeguard intended to ensure transparency and autonomy.
Items with classified markings found at Trump storage unit in Florida
"The Inevitable Indictment of Donald Trump It’s clear to me that Merrick Garland will bring charges against Donald Trump. It’s just a matter of when."
Trump's lawyers can't even believe what he tells them. There appears to be much evidence he has intentionally tried to obstruct justice in this case. Just as it appeared he did in Mueller, III's investigation of Russia meddling in the 2016 election.
The former president’s lawyers have told federal authorities no classified material was found in additional searches of Trump Tower in New York and his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
By Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey, Spencer S. Hsu, Devlin Barrett and Rosalind S. Helderman Updated December 7, 2022 at 1:05 p.m. EST|Published December 7, 2022 at 5:00 a.m. EST
Trump Tower in Manhattan in July 2020. (Biz Herman for The Washington Post)
Lawyers for Donald Trump found at least two items marked classified after an outside team hired by Trump searched a storage unit in West Palm Beach, Fla., used by the former president, according to people familiar with the matter.
Those items were immediately turned over to the FBI, according to those people, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
The search was one of at least three searches for classified materials conducted by an outside team at Trump properties in recent weeks, after Trump’s legal team was pressed by a federal judge to attest that it had fully complied with a May grand jury subpoena to turn over all materials bearing classified markings, according to people familiar with the matter.
There has been a lengthy and fierce battle between Trump’s attorneys and the Justice Department in a Washington federal court in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. Much of the legal wrangling remains under seal by a federal judge, but people familiar with the matter say the Justice Department has raised concerns about what prosecutors view as a long-standing failure to fully comply with the May subpoena by Trump’s team.
Emails released by the General Services Administration, which assists former presidents during their transition to private life, show that the government agency helped rent the storage unit at a private facility in West Palm Beach on July 21, 2021. The unit was needed to store items that had been held at an office in Northern Virginia used by Trump staffers in the months just after he left office.
VIDEO - You don’t need to be a spy to break the Espionage Act 3:52 The warrant authorizing the search of former president Donald Trump’s home said agents were seeking documents possessed in violation of the Espionage Act. (Video: Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)
The emails show that the GSA and Trump staffers worked together to arrange to ship several pallets of boxes and other items weighing more than 3,000 pounds from Northern Virginia to the Florida storage unit in September 2021.
A person familiar with the matter said the storage unit had a mix of boxes, gifts, suits and clothes, among other things. “It was suits and swords and wrestling belts and all sorts of things,” this person said. “To my knowledge, he has never even been to that storage unit. I don’t think anyone in Trump World could tell you what’s in that storage unit.”
There was no cataloguing of what was put in the storage unit, Trump advisers said — just as there was no cataloguing of what classified documents were taken to a room underneath Mar-a-Lago.
The Washington Post could not immediately determine specifically what was in the items marked classified. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ultimate significance of the classified material in the storage unit is not immediately clear, but its presence there indicates Mar-a-Lago was not the only place where Trump kept classified material .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/10/trump-records-classified/?itid=lk_inline_manual_18 . It also provides further evidence that Trump and his team did not fully comply with a May grand jury subpoena that sought all documents marked classified still in possession of the post-presidential office.
In addition to the storage unit, the team hired an outside company to carry out the search of Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and, more recently, Trump Tower in New York, according to people familiar with the matter. The outside team also searched at least one other property.
The team offered the FBI the opportunity to observe the search but the offer was declined, the people said. It would be unusual for federal agents to monitor a search of someone’s property conducted by anyone other than another law enforcement agency.
VIDEO - 5 things we learned from the Mar-a-Lago affidavit 1:07 National video reporter Hannah Jewell explains what we learned from the affidavit that made the case for the FBI to search Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence. (Video: Casey Silvestri/The Washington Post)
Trump’s lawyers have told the Justice Department that the outside team did not turn up any new classified information during their search of Bedminster and Trump Tower, according to people familiar with the process, and have said they utilized a firm that had expertise in searching for documents.
The entrance to Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., in October 2020. (Seth Wenig/AP)
“President Trump and his counsel continue to be cooperative and transparent,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said, accusing the Justice Department of committing an “unprecedented” and “unwarranted attack” against Trump and his family.
Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell told Trump’s legal team to continue to search for documents after the Justice Department expressed concerns that the team had not fully complied with a subpoena earlier this year. Howell, according to people familiar with the matter, did not give specific orders on how a search should be done.
Howell’s instructions followed a breakdown in the government’s trust in Trump’s attorneys that led prosecutors in August to seek a court-authorized FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. Since that time, prosecutors have continued to question whether Trump has returned all materials with classification markings, although what steps the government might take to retrieve such materials or procedures it might require Trump’s advisers and lawyers to implement remain unclear.
Trump’s team has sought to avert another federal high-profile search of his properties, the people familiar with the matter said.
According to the people, at least one of Trump’s lawyers has previously advocated for a less combative approach toward the Justice Department investigation of Trump and his advisers for three potential crimes: mishandling of national security secrets, obstruction and destruction of government records.
That attorney, former Florida solicitor general Christopher Kise, had proposed such a search months earlier. Many of the other lawyers on Trump’s team have rebuffed Kise’s advice, and he has taken a reduced role in the classified documents case while taking a larger role in the New York investigations into the former president, the people said.
People wait for a moving van after boxes were moved out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, inside the White House complex, on Jan. 14, 2021. (Gerald Herbert/AP)
At times in the past, Trump has misled his own lawyers as to what was in the boxes that were taken from Mar-a-Lago, The Post has reported.
For example, he told some on his team that he possessed only newspaper clippings and personal items in 2021. One of his former lawyers, Alex Cannon, declined Trump’s entreaty to tell the National Archives he had returned all items, because Cannon was not sure whether it was true, and his team in February did not release a statement dictated by Trump that claimed he had returned all materials, The Post has reported.
Trump lawyers Christina Bobb and Evan Corcoran met with investigators in June, handing over a taped-up folder of 38 documents collected from the former president’s residence in response to a May subpoena, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter. Prosecutors called the response “incomplete” in court documents and said that they collected evidence of “obstructive conduct” regarding the failure to fully comply with the subpoena.
Bobb signed a certification swearing that she had been told that “a diligent search” was conducted of boxes of records shipped from the White House to Florida when Trump left office and that the file handed over to investigators contained “all documents that are responsive to the subpoena.” Corcoran told the visiting investigators he had been advised that all available boxes placed in a storage room — and nowhere else — had been searched in response to the subpoena, The Post reported.
Soon after, investigators obtained video surveillance of the club .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/10/13/walt-nauta-maralago-trump-documents/?itid=lk_inline_manual_45 .. and conducted more interviews with Trump staffers, leading them to seek a search warrant from a judge on the basis of new evidence that sensitive material still remained at Mar-a-Lago, The Post has reported. When agents executed the search warrant in August, they found additional documents with classified markings in the storage room and in Trump’s office, along with thousands of other government papers and items, according to court records.
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