‘Follow the facts’ Jack
Jack Smith, the latest special counsel to investigate former President Donald Trump, was described by his former colleagues Friday as a by-the-book litigator.
“He’s a very serious lawyer,” Karen Friedman-Agnifilo told The Post, reflecting on the five years she worked alongside Smith (inset) in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
“He’s a ‘follow the facts’ kind of guy,” Friedman-Agnifilo added of Smith, who was picked by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee probes of Trump’s retention of classified documents as well as his attempts to stay in power after the 2020 election.
“He’s perfect for the job,” enthused Daniel Alonso, who was chief of the criminal division at the Brooklyn US Attorney’s Office when Smith worked there.
Smith graduated from SUNY-Oneonta and got his law degree from Harvard before cutting his prosecutorial teeth working for Robert Morgenthau in the mid-1990s, focusing on sex crimes and domestic violence.
In 1999, Smith moved across the East River to the Eastern District of New York, where he rose to become chief of criminal litigation.
“He was very good, an excellent prosecutor,” Alonso told The Post. “He was easily the best violent gang prosecutor.”
Smith prosecuted New York’s first death penalty case in decades — winning the conviction of gang member Ronell Wilson for the 2003 murders of undercover NYPD detectives James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews during a gun buy-and-bust operation on Staten Island.
“I’ve never known him to be a political person,” Alonso said. “There won’t be any ammo there when it comes to Jack.”
Prior to his special counsel appointment, Smith’s highestprofile gig was heading the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section — which probes and prosecutes public officials accused of corruption — from 2010 to 2015.
Smith’s unit had a checkered record during his tenure, securing convictions of Republican former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell in 2014 (overturned by the Supreme Court two years later) and former GOP Rep. Rick Renzi in 2013, but missing out on a guilty verdict for Democratic former Sen. John Edwards in 2012 on charges of using campaign funds to cover up an extramarital affair. That case ended in an acquittal of Edwards on one charge and a mistrial on five others.
“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,” Smith told The New York Times in an interview upon taking control of the Public Integrity Section in 2010. “I can’t imagine how someone who does what I do or has worked with me could think that.”