Jack Smith’s special counsel investigation into Donald Trump and his alleged mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago is reportedly “wrapping up” as the Justice Department moves toward a possible indictment of the former president.
Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland late last year to handle Trump inquiries related to the Capitol riot and the Mar-a-Lago classified records sagas. A decadeslong DOJ veteran prosecutor, he had been a prosecutor at The Hague, where he investigated alleged war crimes in Kosovo, until late last year.
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It was reported by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that Smith “has all but finished obtaining testimony and other evidence in his criminal investigation” into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified information at Mar-a-Lago.
The outlet said that “some of Trump’s close associates are bracing for his indictment and anticipate being able to fundraise off a prosecution.” It added that “in recent weeks prosecutors working for Smith have completed interviews with nearly every employee at Trump’s Florida home” and that “questions that appeared to home in on specific elements Smith’s team would need to show to prove a crime.”
Smith served under Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, leading the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section from 2010 to 2015. Smith led a team of 30 prosecutors in conducting public corruption cases throughout the United States, including a mixed track record of going after high-profile politicians. He also inserted the DOJ into what would become the Lois Lerner IRS scandal targeting conservative nonprofit groups during the Obama years, which Trump has criticized him for since he became special counsel.
Multiple outlets also reported on Tuesday that since becoming special counsel, Smith issued a subpoena to the Trump Organization seeking information on any foreign business deals since Trump took office in 2017, including possible deals in China, France, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Trump Organization told the New York Times that “while the Trump Organization has, for decades, been a global real estate empire, we made a strict pledge to not enter in any new foreign deals while President Trump was in office, a commitment that the company fully complied with.”
President Joe Biden is also being investigated by another Garland-appointed special counsel, Robert Hur. Biden’s personal attorneys said they first discovered classified documents in early November 2022 at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, located in the nation’s capital. Biden’s lawyers then found more classified documents at his Wilmington home in Delaware, and the Department of Justice found more when it conducted its own search.
Garland’s decision to allow personal lawyers for Biden who didn’t have security clearances to search for classified documents at the president’s Delaware homes has also been harshly criticized by Republicans.
Trump attacked “Jack Smith and his group of thugs” at a CNN town hall earlier this month, saying he “had every right to under the Presidential Records Act” to take documents from the White House after he left office and that he “took the documents. I’m allowed to.” He claimed that “who took them more than anybody is Joe Biden.”
Trump argued that the documents “become automatically declassified when I took them.”
Trump’s legal team sent a letter to the House Intelligence Committee in April echoing these themes.
“As demonstrated by the discovery of documents with classification markings in the homes of President Trump, President Biden, and Vice President Pence, deficient document handling and storage procedures are not limited to any individual, administration, or political party,” Trump’s team wrote. “A legislative solution by Congress is required to prevent the DOJ from continuing to conduct ham-handed criminal investigations of matters that are inherently not criminal.”
Debra Wall, the acting archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration, sent a letter to Trump last week telling him that it would be handing over records to Smith, writing, “The 16 records in question all reflect communications involving close presidential advisers, some of them directed to you personally, concerning whether, why, and how you should declassify certain classified records.”
Trump returned an initial batch of 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives in January 2022. However, the National Archives said it had found some records with classified markings and believed Trump continued to possess other records, and in February 2022, it referred the issue to the Justice Department.
Wall sent a May 2022 letter to Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran informing him that an initial review “identified items marked as classified national security information.”
The archivist said this resulted in Biden and the White House being made aware of the situation as the FBI sought access to the records.
The National Archives told Trump’s lawyers in early May 2022 that it “will provide the FBI access to the records in question, as requested by the incumbent President [Biden].” Corcoran pointed to “a few bedrock principles” in a letter back to the DOJ, including that “A President Has Absolute Authority To Declassify Documents” and that “Presidential Actions Involving Classified Documents Are Not Subject To Criminal Sanction.”
The National Archives letter in May 2022 was followed the next day by a grand jury subpoena, then by a June 2022 visit to Mar-a-Lago by investigators, and finally by the August 2022 raid. Garland quickly said that he “personally approved” the search.
The White House, the National Archives, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines all pointed to Garland’s appointment of special counsels in the Trump and Biden classified documents sagas as reasons for missing deadlines or deflecting questions about Trump and Biden earlier this year.
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The Biden administration has also cited the existence of special counsel investigations as a reason to slow-walk information sharing with Republican congressional investigators as well.
The DOJ confirmed the special counsel justification for delays in information sharing, citing Garland’s late 2022 appointment of Smith and Hur as a reason why the DOJ was limiting the sharing of information on these matters.
