SPECIAL COUNSEL STEPS UP THE PACE
Smith aggressively advancing probes related to Trump
Did former President Donald Trump consume detailed information about foreign countries while in office? How extensively did he seek information about whether voting machines had been tampered with? Did he indicate that he knew he was leaving when his term ended?
Those are among the questions that Justice Department investigators have been directing at witnesses as the special counsel, Jack Smith, takes control of the federal investigations into Trump’s efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss and his handling of classified documents found in his possession after he left office.
Through witness interviews, subpoenas and other steps, Smith has been moving aggressively since being named to take over the inquiries nearly three months ago, seeking to make good on his goal of resolving as quickly as possible whether Trump, still a leading contender for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, should face charges.
Last week, he issued a subpoena to former Vice President Mike Pence, a potentially vital witness to Trump’s actions and state of mind in the days before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob.
His prosecutors have brought a member of Trump’s legal team, M. Evan
Corcoran, before a federal grand jury investigating why Trump did not return classified information kept at his Mar-a-Lago residence and private club in Florida. Justice Department officials have interviewed at least one other Trump lawyer in connection with the documents case.
Since returning to Washington from The Hague, where he had been a war crimes prosecutor, Smith has set up shop across town from the Justice Department’s
headquarters and has built a team. His operation’s structure seems to closely resemble the organization he oversaw when he ran the Justice Department’s public integrity unit from 2010 to 2015.
In addition to the documents and Jan. 6 investigations, Smith appears to be pursuing an offshoot of the Jan. 6 case, examining Save America, a pro-Trump political action committee, through which Trump raised millions of dollars
with his false claims of election fraud. That investigation includes looking into how and why the committee’s vendors were paid.
Smith has kept a low profile, making no public appearances and sticking to a long pattern of empowering subordinates rather than interposing himself directly in investigations. It is a chainof-command style honed during stints as a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague, a federal prosecutor in Tennessee and, most of all, during
his tenure running the Justice Department’s public integrity unit, which investigates elected officials.
A spokesperson for Smith had no comment.
But various developments that have surfaced publicly in recent days show his team taking steps on multiple fronts, illustrating how he is wrestling with multiple and sometimes conflicting imperatives of conducting an exhaustive investigation on a strictly circumscribed timetable.
The intensified pace of activity speaks to his goal of finishing up before the 2024 campaign gets going in earnest, probably by summer. At the same time, the sheer scale and complexity and the topics he is focused on — and the potential for the legal process to drag on, for example in a likely battle over whether any testimony by Pence would be subject to executive privilege — suggest that coming to firm conclusions within a matter of months could be a stretch.
In looking into Trump’s efforts to hold on to power after his election loss and how they led to the Jan. 6 riot, Smith is overseeing a number of investigative strands. The subpoena to Pence indicates that he is seeking testimony that would go straight to the question of Trump’s role in trying to prevent certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the election and the steps Trump took in drawing a crowd of supporters to Washington and inciting them.
His team is sifting through mountains of testimony provided by the House Jan. 6 committee, including focusing on the so-called fake electors scheme in which some of Trump’s advisers and some campaign officials assembled alternate slates of Trump electors from contested states that he had lost.
While Smith did not ask Attorney General Merrick Garland’s permission to subpoena Pence, one of the most extraordinary developments of his short time as special counsel, he almost certainly consulted him about it.