Jack - Episode 5 - Who is Jack Smith

Episode Date: January 1, 2023

Allison and Andy tell us about Jack Smith. From his time as a high school benchwarmer to his time at the Hague, your hosts take you through the career of the new Special CounselFollow the Podcast on Apple Podcasts:https://apple.co/3BoVRhNCheck out other MSW Media podcastshttps://mswmedia.com/shows/Follow AG on Twitter:Dr. Allison Gill https://twitter.com/allisongillhttps://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrotehttps://twitter.com/dailybeanspodAndrew McCabe isn’t on Twitter, but you can buy his book The Threathttps://www.amazon.com/Threat-Protects-America-Terror-Trump-ebook/dp/B07HFMYQPGWe would like to know more about our listeners. Please participate in this brief surveyhttp://survey.podtrac.com/start-survey.aspx?pubid=BffJOlI7qQcF&ver=shortThis Show is Available Ad-Free And Early For Patreon and Supercast Supporters at the Justice Enforcers level and abovehttps://dailybeans.supercast.techOrhttps://patreon.com/thedailybeans

Season 4 of How We Win Is Here For the past four years, we've been making history in critical elections all over the country. And last year, we made history again by expanding our majority in the Senate, eating election denying Republicans and crucial state house races, and fighting back a non-existent red wave. But the Maga Republicans who plotted and pardoned the attempted overthrow of our government now control the house. Thanks to gerrymandered maps and repressive anti-voter laws. And the chaotic spectacle we've already seen shows us just how far they will go to seize

power, dismantle our government, and take away our freedoms. So, the official podcast of the persistence is back with season 4. There's so much more important work ahead of us to fight for equity, justice, and our very democracy itself. We'll take you behind the lines and inside the rooms where it happens with strategy and inspiration from progressive change makers all over the country. And we'll dig deep into the weekly news that matters most and what you can do about it, with messaging and communications expert,

co-founder of Way to Win, and our new co-host, Jennifer Fernandez-Ancona. So join Steve and I every Wednesday for your weekly dose of inspiration, action and hope. I'm Steve Pearson. And I'm Jennifer Fernandez-Ancona. And this is How We Win. Hi, I'm Harry Littman, host of the Talking Feds podcast.

A weekly round table that brings together prominent figures from government law and journalism for a dynamic discussion of the most important topics of the day. Most news commentary is delivered in 90-second sound bites to just scratch the surface of a new development. Not Talking Feds. Each Monday I'm joined by a slate of Feds favorites and new voices to break down the headlines and give the insiders view of what's going on in Washington and beyond. We dig deep, but keep it fun.

Clest side bars detailing important legal concepts read by your favorite celebrities, such as Robert De Niro explaining whether the president can pardon himself. And Carol King explaining whether members of Congress can be disqualified from higher office and music by Philip Glass. Find talking feds wherever you get your podcasts and don't worry. As long as you need answers, the feds will keep talking. So Renato, do you still have your own podcast? Yeah, it's complicated. What's so complicated about a podcast? That's the name of the podcast, remember?

Oh! Will you still be exploring topics that help us understand the week's news? You bet, but we'll have a new name because we're going to be working together to explore complicated issues that are done in the news. Working together? Yeah, you're hosting it with me, remember? Oh, right. Wait. Does that mean our podcast is going to have a steam op segment? Let's not get carried away. But we'll discuss hot new legal topics,

so check out our new episode coming soon to everywhere you get podcasts, as well as YouTube. I signed in order appointing Jack Smith. And nobody knows you. And those who say, Jack is a finesse. Mr. Smith is a veteran career prosecutor. Wait, what law have I been through? The events leading up to an on January 6, classified documents and other presidential records.

You understand what prison is? Send me to jail. Hello, everyone. Happy New Year. Welcome to episode five of Jack, the podcast about all things, special counsel. It is Sunday, January 1st, 2023. And you know, Andrew, I've said 2022 was the year of investigations in 2023 is hopefully the year of accountability. I'm Allison Gill. And today I am joined by my co-host to the incredible

former director acting director of the FBI Andrew McCabe. Hi, Andrew. Hey, Alison, how are you? I'm doing really, really well. So we didn't have a lot of special counsel news this week, but tell everyone what we have on deck. That's right. We didn't, but we planned for that. And so we have, I think, what I think is going to be a great show for folks to do. You know, I feel like in all the time I spent working in the FBI, every case is a story. And as a case agent or a supervisor or further on up, you go up the chain, you have to understand so many different stories and carry all the stories of these cases around your head. And the best way for me to do that was always to understand like the people involved in the case, to understand where they came from, what their deal was, what their, you know,

their background, their bio was. And so that's what we're trying to do with Jack Smith for all of our listeners today. So we're going to go through where he comes from, you know, very briefly on where he grew up as education. And then the major career stops that he's made in different places like in US attorney's offices and the department of justice and of course, his work overseas. We're going to talk about cases that he's worked, some cases that he's notable cases that he's won, some notable cases that he lost along the way. And what maybe he learned from those

experiences that will impact or tell us something about how he thinks about his current responsibilities. Yeah. And I remember we did this early on in the in the Mueller she wrote episode. There was so much news that was coming out. We didn't start the first episode until after the Rick Gates and Manafort and Dutman's hit. But right around week 17, we were able to get into a biopod, if you will, of the man himself. And we have a very great surprise for everybody a little bit later in the show. We are going to hear the actual voice of Jack Smith in some closing arguments at the Hague during one of the trials and that he was involved with overseeing there.

And we'll talk a little bit about that case Because that is news that does something that just recently happened That's absolutely right just about you know a week and a half ago So I'm gonna kick us off Andrew. We're gonna talk about a little early life little Jack Smith early life He grew up John L Smith in Clay, New York Which is a suburb of Syracuse He attended Liverpool High School in Liverpool, New York, which is a suburb of Syracuse. He attended Liverpool High School in Liverpool, New York, and he graduated in 1987.

So he's kind of our age, my friend. Yeah, I'm class of 86 right over here. Class of 1981, what would? He was described by his friend Scott Hanson as funny and upbeat. He was also a defensive lineman on the football team, interesting defense. That's right. Tall and skinny and he was a bench warmer mostly. He sat on the bench more than he played, but he was always there.

Kind of, this is sort of like a rudy, rudy sort of story, right? There you go. He was always there. He always put his heart into it. He never sulked about it. He cheered on his teammates like it was his job. And and coach George, I think manged a caro. Remember his very quiet, a tall kid who never failed to show up for practice. You know, you can hear the coach's appreciation for him in that statement. Right? I mean,

like, if you've ever led any group of people, whether it's a coach of a football team or a supervisor at work or whatever you've been, you always deeply appreciate the low drama hard workers that show up every day, put their 100% best effort into things. I mean, for my, you know, for all the teams that I've led over the course of my career, I'll take five of those guys over 100 high flyers any day of the week. You can get some serious work done with people that are just absolutely dedicated and not constantly obsessed with attracting attention. That sounds like the kind of guy that Jack Smith at least started out as, which I think is a good sign.

Right. Sort of the opposite of Rudy, who, you know, never get in between Rudy Giuliani on a microphone, is, you know, that's what he's known for. There's a sort of the opposite, opposite kind of guy. And that's right. And in more ways than one, he scored very high on his SATs, for example. I haven't seen Rudy's SATs, but I don't imagine that probably not correct. I don't think you could score particularly highly on them now. Let's just leave it at that.

We'll just go there. He maintained a 4.0 grade point average at state University of New York. So he's a state schooler. Top 1% score on his LSAT. So very sharp went to Harvard Law School, graduated with honors in 94. So 87 graduated Harvard Law School in 94 with honors. And then that's sort of the early life, sort of how we see him shaping up as, you know, the early beginnings of a prosecutor. And then we kind of get into some of the work he got into immediately after graduating from Harvard.

Yeah, so it's kind of notable to me that Jack goes right out of law school into a prosecutor's job. Like most law school grads, you know, particularly graduates from places like Harvard, they go to judicial clerkships and then maybe start to a few years in a kind of a high paying big white shoe law firm,

you know, somewhere in New York or DC, something like that. Not Jack. He goes right into public service and he does it at the New York County DA's office. Now for those non-New Yorkers that are listening to us today, of course, you know the five boroughs of New York. Each one of those boroughs is a separate county that has its own independent DA's office. The New York County DA's office is the infamous Manhattan DA. So Jack starts out with Manhattan DA shop and he works. Most we could figure out about this was that he worked in the sex crimes and also violent crimes sections. That's that's per Syracuse.com. So we don't have too much detail to offer about his there, except that he stayed for five years, which

is about typical for a first stop on a new prosecutor's career. And in 1999, he made the jump up to kind of the prosecutorial big leagues when he moved over to the federal side in the Eastern District of New York. He got called up to the show, the big show. That's right. You got called up to the majors. So, you know, New York is a weird bird for many, many reasons. One of which is that you have two separate federal US attorney's offices in the city.

You have the one that's based in Manhattan, the Southern District of New York, the infamous Southern District of New York. You hear so much about the place where none other than Rudy Giuliani was US Attorney at one point in his career. And then there's the Eastern District of New York, which is the maybe less well-known kind of harder working, you know, blue collarish office located over in Brooklyn. My heart is, I have a particular fondness in my heart

for the Eastern District, it's where I made all of my first cases as a young agent in New York had great experiences over there working with so many terrific prosecutors to include, of course, Andrew Weissman, who was here on the show a couple of weeks ago. So Jack Smith gets his start in the Eastern District of New York in 1999. Right off the bat, we understand that he prosecuted

civil rights cases, and particularly a notorious police murder case. So this was a case of Ronnell Wilson, who we know that in 2003, Wilson, as a member of what the prosecution went on to call the Stapleton crew, murdered two NYPD detectives, James Nemorn and Rodney Andrews, during an undercover sting on a gun buy in Staten Island. This is a huge case in New York. The murder occurred in 2003. In 2006, Wilson was convicted and sentenced to death.

It was the first death sentence delivered in New York in over or 50 years, I think, at that time. The case then rambles through the most complicated series of appeals, I think I've ever seen. Initially, on appeal, the death sentence is thrown out because the telecourt objected to a jury instruction that was given in which they referred to Wilson as being unremorseful because he neglected to speak on his own behalf at his sentencing, which was considered to be an impermissible statement to the jury. In 2013, the death penalty is reinstated

after a resenancing by a new jury. And then in finally in 2016, it is eliminated again because Wilson is is judged to be mentally handicapped. So kind of a crazy history to that core to that case. But for our purposes, really interesting one because it's a super high profile case, the media coverage of criminal cases in New York is it's unbelievably intense. And so right off the bat, Jack Smith has this kind of foundational experience and a high profile homicide case

that literally everybody is reading about on the front page of the paper every day during trial, I'm sure. Mo Foderman who worked with Jack Smith at the Eastern District described him as, and I quote, one of the best trial lawyers I have ever seen, a phenomenal investigator gets to the true facts. I love this. Mo also describes him as quote literally insane about cycling and triathlons. So as a devoted cyclist and triathlete

myself, I can totally appreciate that. So Jack was on to serve as the chief of criminal litigation and the deputy chief of the criminal division in the Eastern District where he supervised about 100 criminal prosecutors in cases involving violent crimes, gang crimes, white collar cases, financial fraud, and also public corruption. So that's like everything that January 6 has to offer right there. Totally, right? You're going right from the basic violent crimes all the way up to the crazy hard to prove white collar. We have violent crimes. We have gang crimes with the proud boys and the oath keepers. We have white collar crimes going all the way up to like Eastman and Clark and everything that happened at the DOJ financial fraud.

We have the Save America Pack investigation and the Sydney Pile Pack investigation and public corruption. I mean, you know, that's obvious. So I thought that was interesting too. And I also wonder a little bit about prosecuting that case with the murder of the two police. If you know what his personal thoughts were about that. And if that, if there's any sort of transference to January 6th with that and the cops that that were endangered by the incitation of the insurrection and and and how that might, how these earlier cases,

you know, and we'll talk about this more later in the show might inform his, you know, zeal, I guess? Yeah, totally. I mean, I know, um, from my own experiences as an agent in New York, I made mistakes, right? On my first cases, we all do. And those mistakes you learn from them and you carry those lessons through the rest of your career, every big case I ever worked, uh, later in my career was benefited by the first, the very first big case I worked out of the Eastern District of New York was a Rico case against the Russian Organized Crime Crew. And I learned so much there. I would expect that Jack probably had some of those same experiences like for, for instance, in this one, clearly the prosecution went, they swung a little

too hard for the fences in their summation. And the comments they made about Wilson and his, his failure to get up and speak in his own defense at his sentencing and that came back to hurt them, right? It cost them the initial appeal that wiped out the death penalty the first time. So you know, you wonder if experiences like that have kind of caused him to like think twice before you go for the dramatic flourish in front of the jury and maybe you know take them or measured kind of evidence-based tone and all your approaches. So you know we're speculating but it's interesting, interesting stuff

to talk about. Jack's partner on the Wilson case, a prosecutor named Colleen Kavanaugh, and recently Colleen said about Jack, quote, there is no mystery here. He's a hardworking smart person who knows how to move cases. That's who he is. He comes in and he gets things done. Yeah, and that feels like kind of what we've been hearing in the media

about his disposition. He's a closer, right? He comes in and gets things done. We've heard it repeatedly. And it, you know, it, it's a sort of drives home the point that, you know, a lot of folks were like, Oh, Marik Garland is punting this. He doesn't want to do it. He's going to hand it over to somebody else. And a lot of folks were worried's going to hand it over to somebody else. A lot of folks were worried that he was handing it off to have the case wind down. I just don't see that at all. I just don't see you bringing in Jack Smith to close a case. It just doesn't make sense to me.

I totally agree. You and I have discussed this from the beginning. I don't think you bring in a special counsel at all to deliver a declination. I mean, that's, you could do that on your own, right? Yeah, I talked about this on the daily beans. I said, look, if Merrick Garland were truly out to protect Trump as some people are accusing him of doing, very simple solution for him to do that. You whip up an office illegal counsel memo saying why this isn't prosecutable. You hide it from FOIA requests under deliberative process privilege because he knows how to do that now that he went through it with the Bill Barr memo in 2019, the March 2019 Bill Barr memo, refusing to say that any obstruction of justice didn't happen in the Mueller investigation.

And you file it away and it goes away and it disappears. And you don't have to say anything about it because the Department of Justice isn't bound by any regulations to report declination decisions for prosecutions. That's how you make this disappear. If you wanted to make this disappear, you don't hire a special counsel who's kind of known for bringing prosecutions and being a closer to, to, to wind it down and cover

things up and brush it under the rug. It's just that doesn't seem of of course Andrew all of this is speculative, but that just makes absolutely no sense. Yeah, and I agree and I you know it's not that he doesn't have a decision to make or a recommendation to make certainly does and that could go in either direction. It's there's no guarantee that there will be an indictment here on anything. But I think the fact that you bring in a guy like Jack Smith who has a history of stepping in and putting in objective evaluation on ongoing cases

and making decisions about what to push forward and what to let go, that says, hey, the ball is still in the air and we are pushing this thing and we're going to see where the facts land. Yeah, this is less about, all right, Jack, you just, you come in and close the case or you come in and indict and it's more about you come in and make the decisions because I need to insulate myself politically because now I am an appointee of the opponent of the person that we're investigating.

That's exactly right. And what's interesting is that he, the absolute like line of just being a prosecutor from beginning to end here, we go ahead now to 2008, when he was in the office of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. That's the Hague.

He was an investigations coordinator from 2008 to 2010, according to the New York Times. He oversaw investigations of government officials, militia members, wanted for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. And Andrew, that's an interesting choice to go from, you know, working at the DA's office, man in Manhattan, to working at the Eastern District of New York to then go work at the ICC. Totally. Like so we talked about the choice to go right from Harvard Law School into the Manhattan DA's office. Now here we see another really bold choice. You know, nine years in the Eastern District of New York,

that will get you a prime job as a top flight litigator in any number of, you know, white shoe, high pay, law firms in New York. And that is the path that most, you know, assistant US attorneys for kind of line assistant prosecutors. They take they do anywhere five to 10 years as a prosecutor and then jump into the private sector and really cash in and good for them. It's a great opportunity, but not our Jack. He decides in 2008 to kind of book his flight for the Hague, a place that probably most Americans couldn't find on a map and to dive into kind of an obscure true specialist

prosecutorial role here, right? So now you're dealing with international criminal law, which is a strange and nebulous thing because there basically is no kind of, you know, universal agreement on what those laws are. You really kind of, you have to stitch together, complicated, brought politically charged cases in faraway locations. It's hard to get those defendants in custody. It's even harder to stitch together cases to successfully prosecute those defendants. And that's the role that he charges into next. Yeah, we don't have vote. It is an interesting, I'm sorry, I didn't read it. It's really interesting career path.

Because like you said, most folks come out of those DA offices and AUSAs, as AUSAs in the federal offices, into a private firm. And then you've got all this private firm experience which you then take with you to a Department of Justice job. That's right.

That's the typical path, right? Or US Attorney up to there. And so he's like, now I'm gonna take a quick detour over here to the ICC, learn an entirely new set of laws that have to be applied because all of his experience so far is in the American criminal judicial system. And so so far is in the American criminal judicial system. So now he's in the international courts and learning that whole entirely different

set of law. I mean, it's not just the law. It's also how to apply the law. Like you said, you'd be rarely find these these folks and it seems very murky and niche. And it's just it was an interesting career choice, I thought. But I think going to serve him well, we'll talk about that later. Absolutely, absolutely. So he does that from 2008 until 2010, according to New York Times.

And then in 2010, you can never really ever escape the call of the mother ship. It's no different in DOJ than it is at the FBI and when you're out in the field, you know, living the good life in the phone rings and somebody who tells you it's time to come back to headquarters. So it looks like Jack Smith got one of those calls in 2010, likely from Laney Brewer, who was at the time, he was the acting attorney general for the criminal division. And Jack decides to end his European sojourn and head back to DC to be the head of DOJ's public integrity section, which insiders routinely refer to as pin. Public integrity is the place that basically oversees

all of the political corruption cases and kind of, you know, fraud cases by people serving in positions of public trust around the country. It's very high pressure place to work. political by definition, right? So each case is kind of buffeted by very strong opinions for and against much like the case that Jack is currently working on. So in 2010, he rolls into Penn. Now, at the time, Penn is really on shaky ground. The department and the FBI had suffered a kind of a bitter defeat in the investigation and prosecution of former

Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska. We can do a whole episode on the Ted Stevens cases and all the problems that were there. But essentially, Stevens was prosecuted and I believe his convictions were vacated on appeal. There were no all kinds of problems in the investigation and with the case agents and the informants and relationships between them and there were serious issues. In addition to having the case run, I'm pretty sure the prosecutors got like reprimanded by the judge, but this was like stuff that was happening right before he got to pin, right? That's right. That's right. So he arrives and they're still kind of like trying to get the feet,

their feedback underneath them. And so, so, uh, Jack's first few months at pin were spent basically reviewing all of the major investigations and cases that they had going, uh, in pin at that time. in pin at that time. And in many of those cases, our man Smith decides to issue essentially declination letters, close the cases, and eliminate the prosecutions of some pretty notable figures on the hill. So here's a few of the names of folks whose cases were dismissed by Jack Smith, not long after he arrived at Penn. So Senator John Ensign of Nevada, who was a Republican, Representative Tom Delay of Texas, another Republican, Representative Jerry Lewis of California, another Republican, Representative Alan B. Mollahan of West Virginia, Democrat, and Representative Don Young of Alaska,

a Republican who coincidentally just died last year. So he came in and sort of closed all those cases based on reading into what the prosecutors had put built before he got there. And I guess I'm assuming was like, we don't, we don't, these aren't cases we can win. There were problems maybe in the investigations and prosecutions. And I feel like, Andrew, what that says to me is that if he steps in here and reviews and is read in on all the cases on January 6th, insurrection, obstruction, finances,

and of course the documents case, that if he looks over these and doesn't just start dismissing cases, I feel like that says that the Department of Justice up to this point has put together good cases and done good work or solid work or at least work enough to build potential cases on or potential prosecutions on, because he seems to me like the kind of guy where if he doesn't feel like they have the case or the work hasn't been done, you know, up to snuff to obtain and maintain convictions upon appeal, that he isn't going to let them sort of go forward. And it reminds me, Andrew, of Matt Graves, when he arrived at the DCU S attorney's office, because I think he came in November or so of 2021. And before he was there, it was a guy named Mike Sherwin. And I think we've talked a little bit about

Mike F.ing Sherwin as my nickname for him. We'll just leave it at that. But he was, he wanted to bring, you know, he went on 60 minutes and said, we're going to bring seditious conspiracy charges against these oath keepers. And then was dressed down by Judge Ahmed Mehta for discussing that on 60 minutes. And then he was about to be referred over to the unit that put sanctions on you. And he resigned before that happened.

And according to public reporting, Mike Sherwin brought a seditious conspiracy case against the oath keepers to Merrick Garland. And Merrick Garland said, nah bro, you don't have it. We don't have it. And incomes, Matt Graves, and is able to button that case up and bring the charges successfully at least against Stuart Rhodes and Megs. Now we have two other seditious conspiracy trials on the way.

It seems like there was enough cleanup that could be done, enough rescuing in those cases that could be done to bring those charges. So I'm very interested to see how, and now it's been five or six weeks since, you know, Jack Smith has been appointed, very interested to see. I mean, we haven't seen any big dismissals or declinations or refusals to prosecute him. And I want to be clear that we might not see that until the final report comes out. I don't think they announced declinations to prosecute along the way, but they would have to, you know, I guess close a case in court. So I just think that this is a very interesting and very, it's, it speaks a lot to, to why they decided to specifically bring Jack Smith on board.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think your proposition is fair. If we don't see the long, the more time that goes by that we don't see things getting kind of thrown by the wayside, it's probably an indication that Smith is reviewed what they have, what they've done and feels that there's a there's a path and a reason to keep going forward. You know, Brewer described Smith as a guy who makes the tough decisions. He sees his job as pushing for a conclusion, and that it's not fair to let inquiries linger.

So factor all that in having had this experience before in the Eastern District about or I'm sorry in Penn about, you know, looking at these high profile cases, making an honest assessment and determining where it's time to, you know, fish or cut bait. You can imagine that he's doing that with his current responsibilities. The only solid indicators we have so far in the context of the Marlago case, and there he is clearly dug in. They have taken some aggressive moves

in the Marlago case, even since he's been on board with the filings they've made in court with respect to the appellate work that they've done, and the move for contempt charges against the Trump team for essentially failing to produce additional evidence and failing to comply with the grand jury subpoenas over the classified material.

So he's clearly moving out with forward. You know, we don't need to, I don't believe there's any declinations going on in that one unless something really turned around quickly when we weren't looking, but yeah, I think he's charging forward. Yeah, and we're going to talk a little bit more after the break about his work at Penn and what some folks had to say about him shortly after he took that job. And we're going to do that, like I said, right after this quick break, everybody stick around. We'll be right back.

Okay, we are back and resuming our march through Jack Smith's career and some of the more notable cases, things that he said along the way. And of course, lessons he may have learned from some of these notable cases. So when we last spoke, we, Jack got his feet underneath them at Penn conducted some reviews of ongoing cases during that period. And shortly after taking the job, Smith told the AP that he saw his role as serving people like he grew up with in Central New York. And I quote, they pay their taxes, they follow the rules, and they expect their public officials to do the same. That is a great quote from a prosecutor standard, you know, for the love of God in country, I'm going to hold people accountable.

So it's exactly kind of what you would hope to see from a guy in that position. Lanny Brewer, who we mentioned before, recruited Jack to come back to Penn, who described him as a terrific prosecutor with a real sense of fairness. Brewer went on to say, if you're gonna have a special prosecutor, you want him to be fearless, but fair,

and not gonna be intimidated, and not overly bureaucratic. That's Jack, he's all these things. How do you think that differs from Mueller or does it? I think it's, I think it's similar in the most substantial ways, right? So I know, I know Mueller to be certainly fearless and fair. I think his performance as special counsel is certainly a testament to his fairness. Maybe he was more fair than a lot of people

who would have liked him to have been. Overly bureaucratic, that's a tougher call. Yeah, I was gonna say Mueller strikes me as a little more bureaucratic. You know, I mean, look, he's an older school guy, right? He can't comes from a very different history, different path, certainly through this country and through his military service

and his time developing as an early lawyer in some of his experiences. So, I don't know Jack Smith personally. I do know Mueller personally. If I had to take a guess, I think Jack Smith is a little bit more modern, right? Maybe a little bit more aggressive, a little bit more willing to kind of,

you know, fought land in a new place on some of these issues, whereas Mueller is very much a servant of precedent. Yeah, he sort of went out of his way to err on the side of caution, I think. Yeah, I think Mueller did. And I think the New York Times said of Jack

that he is another very important thing, you know, going back to the politicization of the Department of Justice. They say Jack is not political at all. He is straight down the middle. Now we've heard some arguments from the right wing, from the MAGA camp that he is, and I have to say this reminds me of what happened to you. Just straight down the middle, but then incomes Trump and says, yes, but your wife did this

and your daughter is this way. Just throwing everything he can think to sort of politicize it himself, to make it him the victim and to say, you're coming after me because of my political stances. It's like, well, if your political stances are crimes, then yes, we are coming after you for your political stance. That's right. So, you know, and it's on it. It's really dispiriting to see the rest of that community on the conservative side, the Republican side is just kind of aping those same tactics and doing it now, of course, targeting Jack Smith and his wife. They don't have, there is absolutely not a single piece

of evidence that would point to a history of making political decisions in his career. We've looked at it and we're are looking at it today as closely as anybody has. And so if you can't say anything political about him, the next best thing you can do is try to defame his wife. It's a disgusting tactic. And you're right.

It's one that Jill and I had to suffer through as well. But it doesn't have, it doesn't, the day it doesn't hold any water whatsoever. Public corruption cases are by definition political. But that doesn't mean that the decisions in those cases and the decisions that open cases and pursue investigations are politically driven, but they unavoidably impact politics in one way or another, which, you know, it's understandable. People very heated opinions about that stuff.

Yeah. And we're going to talk some more about those very political cases that are political in nature because you're in the public corruption. You know, I mean, these are investigations into elected officials and people who hold those positions. And, you know, during his tenure, there he hired a ton of new prosecutors at the public corruption's unit and supervised dozens of them during his years there. Right now, I think he has a team of about what, 40 or so that he's supervising. And, you know, it's very, I think, telling some of the previous cases that he was involved in either after he arrived at public corruption that we're already going on or that he started or oversaw that began under his tenure at Penn. Can you talk about some of those examples?

Yeah, sure. And, you know, like we've been talking about, these cases, the way to undermine those attacks is to look at the evidence and look at the proof and look at the convictions that come from independent juries of your peers, right? And so let's look at some of those cases. One of the first ones I stumbled across was this prosecution of Representative Rick Ren I stumbled across was this prosecution of

Representative Rick Renzi, who was a Republican of Arizona. He had a really troubled experience in in Congress for a whole variety of reasons. This isn't the Rick Renzi show, so I won't go into all those. But nevertheless, he was indicted in 2008 before Jack Smith was in public the public integrity section. Lots of appeals during the pendency of his prosecution, before Jack Smith was in the public integrity section, lots of appeals during the pendency of his prosecution, but Renzi was ultimately convicted in 2013 on 17 out of 32 counts in a corruption case that had him accused of using his office for personal financial gain and basically looting a family insurance business to help pay for his 2002 campaign.

Renzi was convicted and ultimately served three years at Morgantown, West Virginia, and then notoriously pardoned by Donald Trump in 2020. So here's one of those cases that was ongoing when he arrived was probably subjected to the same sort of review that he applied to those other cases that he issued declinations in. And this one clearly had his support went forward. And we have a pretty substantial conviction of a Republican. So now let's flip the script. And let's talk about this Jack to Smith, while he's a pin ever prosecute any Democrats. Well, in June 3, 2011, after a two year investigation,

John Edwards, Senator John Edwards from North Carolina, was indicted on six felony charges of violating multiple federal campaign contribution laws, basically to cover up an extramarital affair to which he eventually admitted. So here's a similar case against a Senator for basically financial skulled doggery around campaign finances.

And this one Smith's team at Penn really went to the mat on Edwards was was facing four counts of collecting illegal campaign contributions and one count of conspiracy and an additional count of false statements. So his trial begins on April 23rd, 2012. And in May 2012, he is acquitted. So the jury ultimately finds him not guilty on one of the, one of the counts of illegal use of campaign funding. And then declared a mistrial on all remaining accounts.

In the aftermath of this huge loss for Penn, DOJ decided to drop all charges against Edwards and announce that they would not retry the charges against him. So DOJ basically washed their hands of it and walked away. I think this is a fascinating example. I can only imagine the conversations that went on around those tables in DOJ over this one, but it really causes you to wonder like, you know, you always learn more from your failures than you do from your successes. This is clearly a failure at pin under Jack Smith's watch. And you wonder if maybe some of the things he took away from this was essentially what they failed to do is prove to the jury that Edwards had the requisite intent

that the charges called for. So, you know, you have this distraction of the extramarital affair. Edwards had the requisite intent that the charges called for. So, you know, you have this distraction of the extramarital affair, and there was also an illegitimate child involved, and all these allegations about taking essentially campaign funds and using them to pay for things for this woman and her child, and to try to cover up the relationship that Edwards had with her.

And despite all that salacious evidence, when they got back into the deliberation room, that jury sat there and could not come to an agreement as to whether or not Edwards had the requisite intent to be found guilty of the majority of these charges. Yeah. And it's also interesting, I think, that despite it being difficult to prove, you know, intent, he, he, he not all, I mean, this is a case that was being investigated before he got there. And then he just said, this is another one he decided not to, you know, dismiss or, or decline to prosecute.

And he thought that he had the goods. He thought the law and the facts were on his side. Many would argue that they were. And this is, by the way, in a democratic administration that they decided to bring these charges. And so if we, you know, DOJ, not really surprised DOJ decided not to retry this case. However, I really think it speaks a lot to his dedication to facts and law and less about, well, what if one juror decides that the intent's not there, you know, sort of a more conservative approach where if you, you know, you think possibly you might not be able to get that

conviction, you just don't go forward with charges. He seems like the kind of person who would, and I don't think a lesson learned from this would be to not go forward with charges in those instances. No, I think you're right, but it may cause you to rethink this, the value and the impact of the witness, of the evidence that you use to try to prove intent. And that could make you more cautious, more determined, more focused in cases

and prosecutions that you are involved in as you go forward. I also think it says something about walking away, realizing you lost the case that you put on was not sufficient to garner a conviction. And rather than taking it on as like a personal vendetta, while we're gonna try him again, because you do see a fair amount of that in cases that have missed trials. You know, I'm sure Smith and his supervisors at the department said, no, this is it. We got the message and this thing is over.

It's time to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and start all over again. I guess. Here's now I know what I need next time to prove that intent, which is going to come up in these potential prosecutions of Trump and his allies with regard to both January 6th and the documents case. There's going to need to be for some of the charges that you're going to have to prove some intent. And you know that very well from midterm exam. Yeah, I mean, look, intent is the is the toughest piece of the puzzle that you have

to find and assemble and insert into your picture in any white collar prosecution, and certainly in any public corruption prosecution, in the Hillary Clinton email case, which you just referred to, I mean, that was essentially our conclusion at the end of that investigation was we didn't have clear enough, strong enough, convincing enough evidence of Secretary Clinton's intent to have, you know, classified material

on her personal email system. And the case was not, you know, it was not worth going forward. It was not ready. It wasn't, it didn't merit an indictment, you know, which makes sense. Because first of all, none of the documents or emails she had were marked, which is not the case in this case. And then we went over with Andrew Weissman and Ryan Goodman, their Prost memo, their model prosecution memo, and one of the cases that they used to illustrate how this is different and how there is intent here in the Donald Trump Mar-a-Lago documents case was midterm exam. They use that as an example of

Here's when you don't and here's how it's different from what we have now and they they outline that pretty clearly That's right Coming up now in may of 2014 Andrew Interviewed by House oversight and government reform committees with regard to the Republican led investigation into alleged targeting of to the Republican-led investigation into alleged targeting of conservative nonprofits at the IRS. Do you remember this? This was like the Republicans were like, why do you keep investigating and taking away

our tax exempt status for only the conservative things? And it's like, well, because you all are the ones that are breaking the laws. But that's not exactly what happened. This was a painful investigator. I was not involved in this thing at all until I got to the Washington field office as AIDIC in 20, whatever that would have been 14, 15, something like that. And there were still echoes of this case and the final conclusion by DOJ that know there was no indication that, you know, a proper selection or targeting was taking place at the IRS. It was a very hard conclusion and a very unpopular conclusion

to put out. So it was interesting to me in looking through some of these things to really to learn that Jack Smith was questioned about a 2010 meeting he had with lowest learner, lowest learner was the IRS official really at the center of this inquiry. So in 2014, Jack goes in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, as we refer to Hogueer, to be questioned about this meeting that he had with Lois Learner in 2010. So we haven't seen the transcript of this. I don't believe it's public, but CNN has reported on this exchange, and I apparently has had access to the transcript or seen it somehow.

And in that exchange, Smith explained that the purpose of the meeting with Lerner was to understand, quote, the evolving legal landscape of campaign finance law in the wake of the citizens United decision. AG, of course, you know citizen United was basically the Supreme Court decision that really changed the face of campaign financing forever. Essentially found that political action committees and corporations

essentially had first amendment rights and could express those first amendment rights by donating as much money as they wanted to candidates. That's a very down-and-dirty explanation of the citizens United. In any case, Jack also spoke about a dialogue that he'd had with the FBI about opening investigations related to politically active nonprofits, but he did not actually open any cases. I quote, pin did not open any investigations as a result of those discussions. And we certainly, as you know, have not brought any cases as a result of that. So that's what Jack testified to. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of the Carter page, whining that continues to go on. Oh, you changed the email, the client Smith guy, and you were spying on the Trump campaign. You were going after a Carter page, blah, blah, blah, 17 problems with your FISA warrant, et cetera.

It's like, we didn't prosecute the guy. I know that that's not the ultimate sort of bellweather as to whether or not it was a good idea to do whatever had to be done, but you, you know, you and I and listeners of this program generally know what that fight was about and that it was absolutely justified and it was side off by Rod Rose and the steed. So, you know, on multiple occasions. So I don't quite understand the, well, I guess I do understand the victimization there, but it was just the only thing that

I think he had as a sort of connection to any sort of spying on Donald's campaign, even though page wasn't even part of the campaign when those FISA warrants were issued. So it's a reminder of that. It's like, it does. It has a familiar smell to it from those times. I think they're both good examples of the toxic mixture you get when you take criminal investigations, high stakes, high profile, criminal investigations, and you infuse them with politics. And that's two very volatile things that are unavoidably

combined when you're working political corruption cases. In this case, Smith finds himself right in the center of the political fight that's being quite frankly manipulated and by conservatives for their own political reasons, of course, same thing that happened with the facts around the Carter Page FISA. But I'm sure it was an uncomfortable place to be having been there many times myself. I understand the pressure that comes along with that. For us, and for our listeners' purposes, it's kind of a good thing. This guy has been in the fire. He's gotten the call from the Hill to come up here, come up here right away, we want to yell at you publicly about something.

He's gone up, done the testimony, defended his position. In fact, he concluded his statement to the committee by absolutely denying that anyone at the department was pressuring the IRS to do anything and went on to say, quote, anybody who knows me would never even consider asking me to do such a thing. So he's been in the crucible. He's gone through the pressure and the fire on the hill. Those experiences will serve him well with the cases he's dealing with now. Yeah. And one of the other public corruption, one of the pin cases that he was involved with, eventually ended up at the Supreme Court. And this is kind of like stood out to me as what if something that happens now ends up

at the Supreme Court through a series of appeals. And basically this is the prosecution of former Virginia governor Bob McDonald. He was indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on 14 counts related to accepting more than $135,000 in gifts. Now, McDonald and his wife were convicted in September of 2014, about eight months later.

And then in January of 2015, McDonald was sentenced to two years in prison. And then of course, six months later, the fourth circuit affirmed his conviction for a circuit court of appeals. But then it went up to the next year, it went up to the Supreme Court, and they vacated the conviction holding that the trial court's construction of the statutory term official act was too broad encompassing activities such as setting up meetings, hosting parties,

and calling Virginia officials to discuss business. And Andrew, the thing that stuck out in my head when I read about this going up to the Supreme Court and saying that they had too broad of a interpretation of the statute, is this little sticking point with a guy named Judge Nichols, who has decided that the word otherwise in the statute 18, title 18, US code 15 12 C2 means that it can't be applied to some of the insurrection or to any of the insurrectionists on January 6th, obstructing an official proceeding. He has taken this to mean that you have to have to do something with documents to obstruct

an official proceeding. And you can't just like run in and zip tie people's hands behind their backs and threaten the whole lives of everybody there. And 18 other federal judges disagree with this, but there's this one guy. And everyone's sort of like, well, why is the DOJ stuck on this one guy? Why don't they just let it go and whatever? They keep appealing it. It's still right now sitting in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to be decided upon before it goes up to the Supreme Court.

And to me, what this says is this is Department of Justice tying up this one tiny potential loose end of a misinterpretation of a statute that may come into play later if there is a conviction of Donald Trump, for example, or John Eastman or anybody for 1512c2 obstructing an official proceeding That would leave any door open for the Supreme Court to say that you misinterpreted this statute And that's what I think is probably a really important lesson learned from the vacating of this conviction at the Supreme Court level Yeah, I totally think that's right. I think So this is DOJ. This, the current example you just gave, this is DOJ trying to avoid what we call bad law, right? If you get one bad decision, you have five similar cases, five different districts and four of them go one way, and the fifth one goes the other way.

And a, you know, an opinion that you can't really countenance, you have got to appeal that thing. If you have reason to do so, and you believe the law and facts are on your side, you have an almost an obligation to appeal it, even though that's going to take more time and effort, because you don't want that bad decision hanging out there to potentially be used as a precedent for other bad decisions you think would be contrary to the law, not different at all from the situation we had in Florida with the Marlago case, right? Judge Eileen Cannon in her, I don't know how to even describe it, notorious decision to appoint a special master in the Mar-Lago case.

You know, initially I was kind of not a fan of DOJ appealing that because I felt like this is really gonna slow them down and what they need right now is speed. It is this really gonna be that presidential anyway. This case is so unique on the facts, but they clearly disagree with me, which is not the first time. And they appealed

it because they felt like we can't live with this. This could open up a can of worms of monstrous proportions where everybody who's been had a search warrant executed at their home turned around and demand the appointment of a special master and obviously can't have that. The law doesn't support that. And they were right. They did the right thing. They were right. I was wrong. Okay. There you are.

You heard it. And they got rid of that, that ruling in a resounding fashion. So back to the Macdonald case, you know, this going into this case, Jack Smith and his team were working with under the rules that everybody had been working with for a long time, which is the very essence of a public corruption case is you're in a position of trust. If you take something from someone in return for doing some official act, that's essentially public corruption. It's, you know, people who refer to it as the quid pro quo. I'm the governor, you're the businessman, Allison, you come to me and say, hey, I'll pay

for your daughter's wedding if you, you know, whatever, if you support my product X. Well, yeah, we have a great example in Florida right now with the Matt Gaetz investigation into his public corruption of, of, you know, maybe accepting gifts like a trip to the Bahamas in order to put forth this pro marijuana legislation. Yeah, I mean, there's examples of this all the time everywhere that happened consistently and constantly. Yeah, so the conventional wisdom at the time, prosecutions, was you don't actually have to have an explicit, I'll give you this in return for that agreement. And so that really opened up the aperture on what could be considered, what could be considered

an official act and a benefit in return for that official act. So that's the rules they were playing under. They got their conviction. McDonald appealed it and the Supreme Court decision basically rewrote the law and public corruption cases. And essentially where we are now is you have to have an explicit quid pro quo understanding an agreement before charges can be brought because they reset the burden so high in terms of what you have to prove to prove the kind of basics of that quid pro quo that public corruption cases are much harder to make much harder to, you know,

indict and succeed on in the era after McDonald. So I'm with you. I think Smith takes a lot of lessons away from that experience. I would expect that he thinks very differently about the sort of evidence you need to prove these cases, to prove these fraud cases, these conspiracy cases, you know, from his earlier experience in the John Edwards case, to prove in criminal intent in some of these kind of esoteric cases. And I would expect that those experiences are really going to have an effect on what he demands from his investigators and his attorneys before he's ready to go into court and put maybe the highest profile most notorious criminal case we've seen in a century in front of a judge.

Yeah. Yeah. And then there were, you know, several other high profile cases at Penn that he oversaw the prosecution of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. I'll ask you about that in a second. And he also oversaw the Department of Justice investigation into House Majority Leader, Tom DeLay, and made some interesting decisions in both of those cases.

Can you tell us briefly about Jeffrey Sterling and Tom DeLay? Sure. So Jeffrey Sterling was prosecuted essentially for leaking classified information involved regarding CIA operations. It was a really hard case. It was one that relied upon the required testimony of a journalist about conversations that he had had with Sterling. So there were all kinds of battles over whether or not that journalist would be subpoenaed to testify and what they would have to testify to and all sorts of things like that. Very complicated case.

To navigate this first amendment issues, but DOJ and Smith's pin section handled that very well and got a conviction in that case. On the delay investigation, that was one of the ones that we talked about earlier where Jack Smith came in, reviewed it, and just decided there is not enough here to go along with. And I think people on both sides of the house, well, certainly on the Republican side, we're really impressed with his kind of unbiased approach to the case. One Republican source telling CNN that Jack Smith made a quote, just

decision to decline prosecution. So, you know, hopefully a little bit of that credibility rolls with him that should protect him in this case for all of about maybe five and a half minutes. And then it will be in the past and they will resume attacking him viciously. So there we go. Yeah, true. And I really think that that Jeffrey Sterling case has a lot of parallels because it had to do with leaking of classified. And I think that there was probably a lot learned from that conviction and how it might apply here too. And then for a couple of years after that,

he went down to first assistant, US attorney in the middle district of Tennessee and then acting US attorney in the middle district of Tennessee. And he left in early September, 2017 and then became the vice president of litigation at hospital corporation of America. This is only like private sector gig that he's ever had. And that does not make no sense to me at all. And it seems like he was probably only in it for a couple of months. Because he was like, I got to get out of this Trump administration man.

Yeah, what am I doing? You might that might have been it. Maybe it was the only exit. And he was like, you know, you're, when you've been on the highway for two, like, you know, you know, you know, you know, where you are. He's like, I got to get off this thing. I don't know where it's going to put me. But I'm in Texas.

Yeah, here we go. We're staying running litigation for a hospital now, but it's gonna put me, but I'm in Texas. Yeah, here we go. We're staying running litigation for hospital now, but it's better with then where I was. Yeah. Yeah. And then he gets picked back up by by the head, right? That's right. That's right. Yeah. And because there's a lot going on here with this, we could do it. Like I said, you know, like you said earlier, a whole hour on this particular these cases here. But it back in the 90s, right?

We had to break up post communist Yugoslavia, which led to conflicts in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovic, and like, just all of that, like, whole area in that post communist breakup in the 90s, you know, is what kicked off those conflicts. And of course, you know, we have 28 years later, he gets there and starts looking at some stuff with Kosovo, yeah. That's right. So, you know, during those wars in the 90s, you know, atrocities committed on many different sides, we tend to think mostly about the Serbs and the genocide against the Muslims. And that was, of course, quite some time ago. Now, during that fight, I think the important thing to know here is the NATO back forces

from Kosovo, which is the Kosovo Liberation Army, we're kind of widely seen as like the freedom fighters and the protectors in this battle. And they have support as I said of NATO and the Western Alliance. Well, it turns out in 2008 a Swiss prosecutor uncovered that the KLA also was engaged in war crimes, which included the harvesting and selling of organs of prisoners. So they were like cutting organs out of people and selling them for profit. The KLA leader Hashem and I'm going to mispronounce his last name, but I'm just going to say, Fachi was involved in this activity. He goes on after the conflict as this hero of Kosovo, he goes into politics. I think it does a stint as Prime Minister and ends up as president of Kosovo.

Well, in 2014, prosecutors on loan from the US established the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutors Office to investigate and prosecute former KLA members. In 2018, Jack Smith gets brought back over to the hay to run that office. Now, he walks in again to basically an investigative unit in shambles. The stuff they're looking at is decades old. Witnesses have been lost. Many of them feel like they've been lied to by former investigators and prosecutors who didn't follow through on the promises they made. So it was really a very, it's been described as just a mess. So income's jack Smith

and basically rebuilds this thing from the ground up in the model of a US organized crime prosecution, right? He sets about recruiting witnesses that can essentially connect the actual atrocities, the trigger pullers, right? The guys who did the bad things on the ground with the leadership figures who issued those orders, who kind of executed those plans and kind of were responsible

for the whole thing. That's what gets you from those trigger pullers up to a guy like the president of Kosovo. Very relevant in the January 6th investigation. Very much so. When you're talking about if there's any connections at all between the boots on the ground, attack on the Capitol and the leaders of the insurrection going all the way up to Donald Trump. Yeah, no question, no question. And he pulls it off. He makes, you know, the builds the miracle case in June of 2020, his office reveals that Fachi had been indicted and he makes this revelation on the eve of Fachi's meeting with none other than Donald Trump at the White House. So apparently I had missed this when it happened, but apparently I guess the Trump administration

was thinking about this as like a major diplomatic achievement And then they find out the guy that they're meeting with has just been indicted as a war criminal. Some folks have, you know, have speculated that the timing was set to kind of disrupt that. She's efforts to lobby Trump to potentially sink the case. Who knows? That's all, that's all, I think speculation at this point. But nevertheless, you know, it's a pretty, it's a pretty safe speculation. I mean, how many they tried to lobby the Hulk bank to get that drop? They tried to lobby the Venezuelan, a good thing to get drop Rudy, bench, cows, all these guys were involved in all the, I am DB was that one

one MDB and all those other cases. So yeah, this is not this is not new, new business in and watching. But as you reminded me just before the show, we had some, you know, Smith had some notable success in the Hague just before taking a special counsel gig. Yeah, absolutely. This came down just on December 16th. That's two weeks ago. And CNN reports a war crimes tribunal in the Hague on Friday sentenced a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA, to 26 years in prison for the war crimes of arbitrary detention, torture, and murder. The Mustafa case, that's Salih Mustafa was won overseen by Jack Smith, as we've talked about, the panel of judges in the Tribunal found Mustafa guilty of crimes that occurred in 1999 in a village in Kosovo

used by a base by the KLA unit that Mustafa led during the conflict with Serbian government forces. This is the first war crimes verdict in the Kosovo Tribunal, and it moved 26 years. And actually, you know what, this is, I promised a little bit earlier in the show that we had some tape of Jack Smith. I believe this is him and his closing argument, or at least in part of the closing arguments or the summation. I'm not sure what they call it in the ICC, but let's take a listen to that. Mr. Mustafa, whose acts have caused suffering that left indelible wounds in the bodies

and the minds of the victims who suffered through it. As a prosecutor, it is beyond my remit to argue to you or decide what wars were just and what wars were not. But I can say with conviction that war crimes on one side do not justify war crimes on the other side. Mr. Grichadi and Mr. Heridan I are vocal opponents of this institution, denigrating anyone who would recognize or cooperate with the Coast of Los Specialist Chambers or the Specialist Prosecutors Office as spies, collaborators, and traitors who betrayed their fellow countrymen. So yeah, 26-year conviction, successful conviction and his last moments at the Hague.

That's right. Yeah, and that 26-year conviction came a month after he was appointed a special counsel. Now, here we are. And he's still like leaving ripples behind him of successful prosecutions during his time at the Hague. Yeah, this as his colleague said, this is a guy who gets things done. And, you know, Merrick Garland, the notoriously under- under-spoken Merrick Garland said in his announcement, Mr. Smith is the right choice to complete these matters and even handed an urgent matter. Period, nothing else necessary. And I think that's

what that's what we've seen with this look back over his career. So, you know, John L. Smith at this point is our special counsel. His, uh, in terms of his family life, he's married to Katie Chivini. I think if I'm pronouncing that, probably also incorrectly. She is a documentary filmmaker. Um, a lot of nonsense has been made about the fact that she was a producer on Michelle Obama's film becoming and that she donated to President Biden's reelection campaign. Again, this is America. Your spouse is allowed to have the political opinion. And it doesn't, it may be it's similar to your own. Maybe it's not having being married to someone who has political opinions doesn't make you political in the work that you do for the United States government. So good for him and good for her. They also have one daughter, which is great. And of course, we mentioned that Jack is an avid triathlon athlete. I read somewhere that he's

a former member of the USA triathlon team. I haven't confirmed that, but I like to think that it's true. So I will. And of course, we know that he's currently on the mend from a from a recent bike accident. So what does all this tell us quickly, Allison, as we now think about these things in in retrospect, I mean, some of the takeaways that I get from his bio, this guy's a team player from his very first days in school, all the way up through every every position he's had, whether that's as a line assistant running cases or as a supervisor overseeing those things, he also has a massive body of criminal investigative

and prosecutorial experience. Much of it, I would note, targeting high profile, politically sensitive people, and a ton of experience leading, supervising and overseeing big, complicated, high profile investigations. And that is good for his current work. Yeah, and he also has the experience of connecting boots on the ground,

sort of violent extremists to the leaders of those violent extremist movements, which I think will come in handy. He's got that experience in the case, the CIA officer case about classified. So he knows he's very familiar with that. And I mean, just prosecutor from stem to stern, just prosecutor. He's got so much experience, prosecuting cases in trial, not only here, but abroad for various

levels. various levels of you, you know, the leader of the KLA, you know, are like just absolutely top level politicized investigations. He knows how to navigate these super well. And I think I, you know, I can't think of a better fit, honestly, with all of that experience to bring into this particular case, especially with the eye on the sense of urgency because he seems to have that. And he is a, he is a fish or cut bait guy as well. And I think we've seen that from his past prosecutions. Like, if I don't have it, I'm closing it. And that's right. Move on. Yeah. And I think that that could temper the guy who's in charge of the finance section who wasn't necessarily a fish

or cut bait kind of a fellow with regard to your investing. Maybe he'll learn a few things from his new boss. One can only help. So yeah, I agree with you. I think he's incredibly great candidate for this role. Incredibly well placed. And now Jack Smith, let's see what you got. Yeah. You're in the right place at the right time. Now it's just a matter of doing it. And we will be here watching every development of that and talking to you all along the way. So it's going to be a fun ride. Yeah, absolutely. Welcome to the year of accountability. And thank you for listening to the Jack podcast. If you want to become a patron, you can

do that at patreon.com slash muller. She wrote, we appreciate you. I've been Allison Gil and I am Andy McCabe. We'll see you next time. They might be giants that have been on the road for too long. Too long. And they might be giants aren't even sorry. Not even sorry. And audiences like the shows too much, too much. And now they might be giants who are playing their breakthrough album, all of it. And they still have time for other songs. They're fooling around. Who can stop?

They might be giants and their liberal rock agenda. Who? No one. This happens to pay for it with somebody else's money. M-S-W-Media.