They are poised to have an outsized influence on the GOP in Congress, sowing chaos and weaponizing their power to exact concessions from hapless leaders who are too weak to hold them off, and too beholden to the former president to stand their ground against the MAGA invasion.
“Insurrectionists willing to be insurrectionists even after the violence of Jan. 6 makes you wonder what they want to do with that power if there’s another Trump candidacy. You have to hope they act responsibly, but they may not,” says Ned Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University who specializes in U.S. elections.
The lame duck session currently underway could be the last gasp of sanity before the craziness takes hold. Passing the Electoral Reform Count Act of 2022 is critical, says Foley, to prevent another Jan. 6 in 2025—should Trump or some other MAGA-backed candidate be unhappy with the outcome. The reform significantly raises the bar for legislators to lodge an objection, and it takes governors out of the equation, a reform that eliminates the risk posed if an election denier like Kari Lake took office.
We learned earlier from a “whistleblower” that a religious right group had spent years infiltrating the wingnut Supreme Court members to influence them to vote on their issues. It certainly seems to have paid off. Now there’s evidence that at least one Supreme Court member reciprocated and gave them a heads up about an important decision. That Justice was Samuel Alito. Of course it was.
In a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and in interviews with The New York Times, the Rev. Rob Schenck said he was told the outcome of the 2014 case weeks before it was announced. He used that information to prepare a public relations push, records show, and he said that at the last minute he tipped off the president of Hobby Lobby, the craft store chain owned by Christian evangelicals that was the winning party in the case.
Both court decisions were triumphs for conservatives and the religious right. Both majority opinions were written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. But the leak of the draft opinion overturning the constitutional right to abortion was disclosed in the news media by Politico, setting off a national uproar. With Hobby Lobby, according to Mr. Schenck, the outcome was shared with only a handful of advocates.
Mr. Schenck’s allegation creates an unusual, contentious situation: a minister who spent years at the center of the anti-abortion movement, now turned whistle-blower; a denial by a sitting justice; and an institution that shows little outward sign of getting to the bottom of the recent leak of the abortion ruling or of following up on Mr. Schenck’s allegation.
The evidence for Mr. Schenck’s account of the breach has gaps. But in months of examining Mr. Schenck’s claims, The Times found a trail of contemporaneous emails and conversations that strongly suggested he knew the outcome and the author of the Hobby Lobby decision before it was made public.
In May, after the draft opinion in the abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, was leaked in what Justice Alito recently called “a grave betrayal,” the chief justice took the unusual step of ordering an investigation by the Supreme Court’s marshal. Two months later, Mr. Schenck sent his letter to Chief Justice Roberts, saying he believed his information about the Hobby Lobby case was relevant to the inquiry. He said he has not gotten any response.
In early June 2014, an Ohio couple who were Mr. Schenck’s star donors shared a meal with Justice Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann. A day later, Gayle Wright, one of the pair, contacted Mr. Schenck, according to an email reviewed by The Times. “Rob, if you want some interesting news please call. No emails,” she wrote.
Mr. Schenck said Mrs. Wright told him that the decision would be favorable to Hobby Lobby, and that Justice Alito had written the majority opinion. Three weeks later, that’s exactly what happened. The court ruled, in a 5-4 vote, that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance covering contraception violated their religious freedoms. The decision would have major implications for birth control access, President Barack Obama’s new health care law and corporations’ ability to claim religious rights.
Justice Alito, in a statement issued through the court’s spokeswoman, denied disclosing the decision. He said that he and his wife shared a “casual and purely social relationship” with the Wrights, and did not dispute that the two couples ate together on June 3, 2014. But the justice said that the “allegation that the Wrights were told the outcome of the decision in the Hobby Lobby case, or the authorship of the opinion of the Court, by me or my wife, is completely false.”
Mrs. Wright, in a phone interview, denied obtaining or passing along any such information. A representative for Hobby Lobby would not comment. Beyond sharing Justice Alito’s statement, a spokeswoman for the court declined to answer questions about Mr. Schenck’s account or its investigation.
Mr. Schenck was not present at the meal and has no written record of his conversation with Mrs. Wright. But The Times interviewed four people who said he told them years ago about the breach, and emails from June 2014 show him suggesting he had confidential information and directing his staff to prepare for victory. In another email, sent in 2017, he described the disclosure as “one of the most difficult secrets I’ve ever kept in my life.”
Alito is not a Justice. He is a right wing operative, as are the rest of the 6 member majority. And as operatives with lifetime tenure they have no qualms about pushing their agenda even in light of ample evidence that they are what they are. Just look at how Clarence Thomas has handled the scandal of his wife trying to overturn the election. (Does anyone think she wasn’t sharing the thinking of her husband with the loons she was in contact with? )
This may end up being the worst scandal the high court has ever had. The problem is that, like the rest of the right wing legal establishment — and the right wing in general) shamelessness is their super-power. They. Don’t. Care.
Whatever else happens in our political system. If we manage to beat back the Republicans at the ballot box and show them democratically that the country rejects them these people will still wield incredible power and there’s not a whole lot anyone is going to do about it.
Ivanka begins her long road back to respectability. She really wants to be invited to the Met ball again but her friends have all abandoned her. She’s got a lot of work to do.
Omarosa was on MSNBC this morning and knows Ivanka. I think her analysis was spot on:
Ivanka is very strategic. She is his favorite child. The fact that she chose that timing, that moment to announce that she wasn’t going to support him was her opportunity to be very much like her father and take the spotlight and let the narrative be about her.
Lol. That sounds right to me. The orange doesn’t fall far from the tree …
A lot of people thought Katie Hobbs had blown it. But she won.
This piece by Bill Sher in the Washington Monthly looks at Hobbs’ campaign and I think he’s right. I had no idea what she should have done differently at the time but just as I figured the Fetterman people probably understood their constituency and their candidate best when they accepted his debate, I figured Hobbs probably did too when she rejected it:
Exactly one week before Election Day, Kari Lake, the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Arizona, held a boisterous rally with Steve Bannon, the indicted former Donald Trump aide whom Lake dubbed a “modern-day George Washington.” Local and national media outlets covered the event.
The contrasting campaign appearances capture the campaign dynamic. Lake wanted the spotlight. Hobbs wanted Lake to have the spotlight.
Hobbs was widely counted out after she refused to debate, saying, “It’s clear that Kari Lake is much more interested in creating a spectacle and having the spotlight than actually having a substantive discussion about the issues.” Lake pounded Hobbs as a coward, a message bolstered by pundits and even fellow Democrats. Laurie Roberts, the left-leaning columnist for the Arizona Republic, wrote in mid-October that Hobbs “played right into the hands of a delighted Lake” and “Hobbs isn’t just letting down Democrats; she may well be letting down Arizona.” Sandra Kennedy, who cochaired Joe Biden’s Arizona campaign in 2020, fretted to NBC News, “I would debate, and I would want the people of Arizona to know what my platform is.”
But the wisdom of Hobbs’s decision became apparent throughout the fall campaign.
To be blunt, Hobbs is not good on television. She awkwardly clings to talking points. Her sentences are infected with “um”s. Lake, however, is a literal pro, a 30-year on-air veteran of TV news. The gap between Hobbs’s media skills and Lake’s is as wide as the Grand Canyon. Like history’s greatest demagogues, Lake dazzled on the stump. She famously did her own makeup for TV interviews. When broadcasting from her home studio, she looked absolutely ethereal.
However, to say Hobbs was “afraid” to debate Lake is to embrace the logic of the schoolyard playground. Let’s not forget: This is the secretary of state who presided over Arizona’s wafer-thin 2020 election and is the target of the most ridiculous and dangerous conspiracy theories peddled by Trump’s loyalists. This is the official on the receiving end of a Republican state senate election review so bonkers that auditors investigated whether fake ballots were shipped from Southeast Asia by checking for traces of bamboo. Hobbs was the recipient of death threats and needed protection from Arizona’s state troopers. Despite that harrowing experience, she stepped back into the arena to run for governor. This is a woman of courage, not cowardness.
Hobbs’s debate decision was based on a clear-eyed assessment of her own strengths and weaknesses. A high-profile media event benefits the candidate with superior media skills.
Such a gambit would not work if the public viewed a successful debate performance as equivalent to a job interview, a necessary bar to clear. But in my exploration of the debate over debates in this space last month, I observed that modern debates are a far cry from Lincoln-Douglas. They are reality TV shows marked with soporific talking points and cheap insults. It’s not just that voters don’t care about debates. Voters have good reason not to care about debates. They are not especially useful at helping voters decide who is best suited to govern.
So instead of playing a game on her opponent’s turf, Hobbs changed the game.
The drama around the debates peaked in mid-October. By late October, the story had played out. Still, in the campaign’s final days, Hobbs didn’t do much to generate a sense of momentum. She generally eschewed big rallies (except for a visit from Barack Obama) in favor of policy roundtables and grassroots organizing events. Meanwhile, Lake was commanding the media stage and holding rallies with the U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters and other Republican election deniers on the Arizona ballot, trying to carry the entire party on her back. Almost every poll had Lake in the lead—the final FiveThirtyEight average had her up 2.4 points, and Real Clear Politics had her up 3.5 points. As victory seemed near, Lake was the beneficiary of more and more media profiles. Perhaps my Google skills have atrophied, but I have yet to find a single Katie Hobbs profile from any outlet, local or national.
The focus on Lake suited Hobbs just fine. Ultimately, the race was not a choice between who was better on TV but, effectively, a referendum on whether Kari Lake was too crazy for the job. Despite having already consolidated conservative support, Lake made little effort to appeal to moderates, independents, and even Republicans still fond of the late Arizona Senator John McCain. At one of her final rallies, she told “McCain Republicans” to “get the hell out.” (McCain’s daughter Meghan issued a statement saying, “My father will always be an icon and the people of Arizona deserve someone better than Kari Lake.”) At the same time, Lake praised state Senator Wendy Rogers, who was censured for making threats against her own colleagues and recently spoke at a white nationalist conference.
And just because Hobbs took a low-key approach to the campaign trail doesn’t mean she was passive. In interviews, she diligently framed the race as “a choice between sanity or chaos,” adding that “election denial is the core of that chaos.” She also closed with a one-two TV ad punch. One was an ostensibly positive ad that recounts the death threats Hobbs faced after the 2020 election and proclaims that “Katie Hobbs protected our democracy” as secretary of state, with the hard-to-miss subtext of Lake’s unwavering election denialism. The second ad hit Lake from the right, charging that her fiscal plans would turbocharge inflation, worsen the state’s water crisis, and “defund police departments.”
In my prediction of a Hobbs victory on the online DMZ Show, which I cohost with Matt Lewis, I argued that in the homestretch of the midterm campaign Democrats, in Arizona and nationally, were sounding the alarm that “democracy is on the ballot,” which would help make the gubernatorial race a referendum on Lake. The Democrats’ exhortation proved powerful. Election-denying candidates for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and secretaries of state in competitive states were largely eviscerated. Add Kari Lake to the list, because Katie Hobbs had a plan to beat crazy and the courage to stick with it.
It was very close, but it was always going to be close. Arizona is an extremely divided electorate so no one should ever expect to win in a landslide (although Kelly put Masters away pretty handily.) Letting Lake be overexposed as the raving nutcase she is was Hobbs’ best bet. She just got weirder and weirder as the campaign rolled on and Hobbs was a known entity, boring but capable, and just enough people were sane enough to make the right choice.
Bill Barr on Trump: “He failed. He didn’t do what the country hoped – that he would rise to the occasion and rise to the office, and he didn’t do that. He’s had his chance. He obviously doesn’t have the qualities necessary. He should stand aside.” pic.twitter.com/u15SlwwAuF
New Bill Barr interview on Trump: “I personally think that they probably have the basis for legitimately indicting the president .. They probably have the evidence .. I think it’s becoming increasingly more likely.” pic.twitter.com/89uuJOyEOO
In that PBS interview where Bill Barr said he thinks DOJ probably has basis for "legitimately indicting" Trump, in the next breath Barr wouldn't rule out supporting Trump again in 2024
MARGARET HOOVER: You don't rule out supporting President Trump again?
A black woman in Omaha kept coming out to her car covered in garbage on a nightly basis, it happened so often she set up a hidden camera to catch who was doing it. Turns out it was a cop that was stalking and harassing her. pic.twitter.com/ns50ia4Zbk
Republicans don’t want to govern, they want to rule, I’ve insisted repeatedly. What that formulation misses is their need for revenge and to perform. Watch any of the professional wrestling-inspired introductions at conservative conventions for proof of the latter.
Turning Point USA is just previews. Now that the GOP will have control of the U.S. House in January, they’ll be bringing the full stage show to Capitol Hill sans the pyrotechnics and rock show lighting.
Prior to Nov. 8, Republicans wailed about inflation. They screamed about crime in the streets. Until they didn’t (Media Matters). Don’t expect them to spend their time addressing the issues they ran on:
“Remember when democrats spent all that time and taxpayer money trying to figure out what ivanka and her husband did in the White House? Oh wait,” tweets Molly Jong-Fast.
The play’s the thing. All of Capitol Hill’s a stage.
Even with their threadbare House majority, Republicans doubled down this week on using their new power next year to investigate the Biden administration and, in particular, the president’s son.
[…]
But House Republicans used their first news conference after clinching the majority to discuss presidential son Hunter Biden and the Justice Department, renewing long-held grievances about what they claim is a politicized law enforcement agency and a bombshell corruption case overlooked by Democrats and the media.
That’s “bombshell,” if it wasn’t clear. Biden’s son is not in government and did not help instigate an attack on the Capitol or interfere with a peaceful transfer of power, as some of his salivating prosecutors may have.
Marcy Wheeler reads into Merrick Garland’s announcement Friday of a special prosecutor for Trump investigations:
When he announced the appointment of a Special Counsel yesterday, Merrick Garland described that “recent developments,” plural, led him to conclude that he should appoint Jack Smith as Special Counsel to oversee the investigations into Donald Trump.
The Department of Justice has long recognized that in certain extraordinary cases, it is in the public interest to appoint a special prosecutor to independently manage an investigation and prosecution.
Based on recent developments, including the former President’s announcement that he is a candidate for President in the next election, and the sitting President’s stated intention to be a candidate as well, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a Special Counsel.
The recent developments he focused on were presidential: Trump’s announcement he’d run again and Joe Biden’s stated plan to run for reelection. But he also described the basis for the appointment not as a conflict (as Republicans and Trump are describing the investigation by a Biden appointee by his chief rival), but as an extraordinary circumstance.
Unsurprisingly, Garland never named Trump as the reason for the appointment. The only time he referenced Trump, he referred to him as the former President. That’s DOJ policy.
When he described the subjects of the January 6 investigation, he included both “any person” but also any “entity” that interfered in the transfer of power.
The first, as described in court filings in the District of Columbia, is the investigation into whether any person or entity unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification of the Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021.
The scope of the January 6 investigation that Smith will oversee is far broader than Trump and will almost certainly lead to the indictment of multiple people in addition to Trump, if it does include Trump — people like Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, possibly Mark Meadows.
But if we assume that everyone who has had their phone seized in that investigation is a subject of it, then Scott Perry, the Chair of the House Freedom [sic] Caucus, would also be included. Perry was the one who suggested that Trump replace Jeffrey Rosen with Jeffrey Clark so DOJ would endorse Trump’s challenges to the election outcome. He pushed a number of conspiracy theories at the White House and DOJ (including the whack Italian one). Along with Meadows and Rudy Giuliani, Perry was putting together plans for Trump to come to the Capitol on January 6. After one meeting with Perry, Meadows burned some papers.
Perry isn’t even the only one who was closely involved in the plot to steal the election. Jim Jordan, the incoming Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, was closely involved as well and is very close to likely subject Mark Meadows.
Indeed, if you include all the members of Congress who discussed or asked for pardons, the number grows longer, in addition to Perry, including at least Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Jordan, Perry, Gaetz, Biggs, Gohmert, and Marge would amount to most of the probable seven person majority in the House.
Marge, as it turns out, is already dreaming up ways to defund this investigation (the means by which she wants to do this, the Holman Rule, probably wouldn’t work; I believe there’s a preauthorized fund from which Special Counsel expenses come from).
In any case, the GOPers mentioned above plan to put on a series of shows in the House meant to distract from possible DOJ investigations/prosecutions coming their way.
Maybe Jordan, Perry, Gaetz, Biggs, Gohmert, and Greene should have stuck to community theatre.
It took six rounds of talks over 17 days before negotiators from G20 countries could finally relax, just after 7pm on Monday evening. Tasked with hammering out a joint draft statement that leaders could agree on at a summit in Bali starting the next day, officials had been locked in negotiations from 8am to well after midnight over the weekend. “It was like all of the pressure suddenly left the room,” said an official from the Indian delegation, as Russia — and China — buckled to allow a qualified condemnation of Moscow’s war against Ukraine.
Billed as the first global summit of the second cold war, western leaders came to Bali under pressure to demonstrate that their opposition to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war had global resonance. Kremlin rhetoric justifying the invasion and blaming western sanctions for the resulting food and energy crises had convinced much of the global south. Many worried that developing countries with strong ties to Russia, such as India and Saudi Arabia, would simply reject any language condemning the conflict, meaning the US, EU and their allies would have to settle for weak conclusions or none at all. But they left Bali with not just a joint statement with clear criticisms of the war’s economic fallout, but also evidence that the developing world’s leading countries were prepared to isolate Russia.
It also stoked hope that Beijing was open to moderating its backing for Moscow. Negotiators, officials and diplomats who spoke to the Financial Times praised Indonesian president Joko Widodo, the summit’s host, and the Indian delegation for tirelessly seeking consensus between Moscow and the western camp. Their success lay in approaching the war in Ukraine from a developing country perspective: its economic impact.
“The Indonesians were smart. They started on something everyone could agree on, which was food security, and then built on that,” said one western delegate. “Widodo was determined to get that declaration . . . He felt Indonesia’s diplomatic capital was used to the max and he employed every trick in the book,” said a person close to Widodo.
On the eve of the summit, as other leaders were arriving in Bali, Chinese president Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden shook hands. Their first face-to-face meeting as leaders followed a dramatic souring of ties over China’s posture towards Taiwan, Beijing’s support for Moscow, its crackdown in Hong Kong and Washington’s growing barrage of trade restrictions. After three hours, the two leaders signalled a mutual desire to arrest that negative trajectory. The positive noises from that meeting set the tone for the talks that followed at the G20 proper, officials from multiple delegations told the FT. It gave diplomats the confidence that there was a window for an agreement in the interests of unity, and at the expense of Moscow.
“It was a really remarkable job,” said a second western delegation official. “There was this extra focus on the G20 . . . many had targeted this to build pressure [on Russia]. And we got a deal.” Putin’s decision to skip the summit spoke to his concern that he would be isolated and snubbed, despite the presence of his four BRICS partners — Brazil, India, China and South Africa. Instead, diplomats said that group, plus Indonesia, turned out to be the crucial swing votes that decided that a joint statement featuring language critical of the war was preferable to no statement at all.
Countries such as Mexico, Argentina and Saudi Arabia were determined not to allow a divide between the G7 and others, people involved in the negotiations said, and while they did not openly attack Russia, they offered no gestures of solidarity either. “This was the first [G20] summit where developing nations shaped the outcome,” said the Indian official. “G20 is valuable for everyone. For the developed and the developing. So what’s the point of ruining it?”
Despite a late, unsuccessful attempt by China to water down the joint statement’s condemnation of the war, western officials took the Xi-Biden meeting and the overall attitude to the Bali summit as a possible opening to better co-operation as they attempted to peel Beijing away from Moscow. “I am convinced China can play a greater role of mediator in the coming months to avoid a more intense land war,” French president Emmanuel Macron said. “I was able to discuss this with Xi Jinping, as well as the idea of me visiting Beijing in early 2023 with the goal of intensifying dialogue on this specific point.”
Western diplomats were also buoyed by Xi’s comments that his administration “resolutely opposes attempt[s] to politicise food and energy issues or use them as tools and weapons”. That was seen as a rebuke to Putin’s disruption of Russian energy and Ukrainian agricultural exports. Two delegates said that China ultimately had been reluctant to be grouped alone alongside Russia, a fear that pushed Beijing to accept the statement.
But it was clear there was still work to be done to bridge deep fissures. In a remarkable example of the mistrust that bedevils ties between western capitals and Beijing, Xi was filmed in a private conversation berating Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau over his handling of a previous discussion. “Everything we discussed was leaked . . . that’s not appropriate,” Xi said, shaking his head.
The China-US relationship needs to be managed Chinese analysts and government policy advisers said that Xi was trying to strike a difficult balance at the G20 by easing tensions with the US and other western countries without significantly shifting his consistent support for Russia’s invasion. Beijing said the war was triggered by Nato’s eastward expansion over recent decades.
In addition to his meetings with Biden and Macron, Xi held talks with the leaders of US allies Australia, South Korea, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands on the sidelines of the G20, and will meet Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida after leaving the summit. “From the standpoint of Xi Jinping’s own interests, it really makes sense for them to think of a stable relationship with the United States as a core interest of China,” said Susan Shirk, a China expert at the University of California in San Diego.
I don’t know about you but I don’t think we saw anything like this during the Trump years. It was all petty bullying and silly grandstanding. And I don’t think anyone misses Boris Johnson either. These leaders are much more serious and experienced and they are letting their staffs do their work to prepare the ground for talks — you know, the way diplomacy is supposed to work. It’s a relief.
This will mean nothing to the Republicans who will do everything possible to paint him as a hardcore left wing partisan and their people will believe it. Maybe some of the normies in the suburbs might be ok with it, however.
Hopefully, this will not create a huge delay but prosecutions, if there are any, won’t be happening any time soon. That’s what Trump wanted by announcing for president and he got it.
Update:
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 Democratic 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.
It’s hard to know what this all means. He sounds like a straight arrow. But then so did John Durham.
