Jack Smith: Is Trump below his pay grade?
Reactions to the Merrick Garland announcement this week of a Trump-case special prosecutor span the spectrum from the cautiously optimistic to the reflexively cynical.*
The legal process has been grindingly slow. Both in Washington, D.C. and in Fulton County, Ga., by the way. But there is less bitterness shown toward Fulton D.A. Fani Willis and her slow, deliberative approach even though she’s holding Trump’s recorded confesssion. Make of that what you will.
Depressing volunteer enthusiasm is the last thing you want to do in field operations. So the bitter, glass-half-empty stance toward this announcement seems pointlessly self-defeating as well as prematurely unjustifed. Ruth Marcus’s observations about Jack Smith run in the opposite direction:
Jack Smith, Garland’s choice, is decidedly low profile. I spoke with a number of former prosecutors who not only didn’t know Smith — they hadn’t even heard of him. But Smith, a longtime federal prosecutor who has been working at The Hague investigating war crimes in Kosovo, offers advantages that the boldface names don’t. He knows how the department works. He knows how to speed an investigation along. “Stop playing with your food,” Mueller used to instruct hand-wringing prosecutors. Smith is, by all accounts, no food-player. And he offers a potential counter-balance to Garland’s innate cautiousness; hard-charging is the word that comes up in speaking with former colleagues.
“Jack Smith makes me look like a golden retriever puppy,” tweeted Andrew Weissmann, the famously aggressive former Enron and Mueller prosecutor who worked with Smith for years in the federal prosecutor’s Brooklyn office.
The process is what it is. Haste makes for lost cases. These people do not like losing. Or wasting their time. Smith has built a career on prosecuting “war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.” Prosecuting posturing pols and con men seems like work below his pay grade. Marcus concludes that Smith’s arrival is ominous for Trump and his accomplices:
Smith didn’t leave his job as a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague to preside over a non-case.
Call me naive, but I find that persuasive. For now, I’ll take Smith’s appointment as a bad sign for the Trump Gang.
* The latter types will use Nancy Pelosi’s withdrawal from leadership to catalog her faults rather than celebrate her accomplishments. Their story has become tiresome.