Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, from Kosovo War Crimes to the Mar-a-Lago Papers

Special counsel Jack Smith addresses the media in Washington on Friday.JONATHAN ERNST (REUTERS)

Jack Smith, special counsel in two key cases against Donald Trump (the Mar-a-Lago papers and his machinations to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election), is defined by his colleagues as a fearless man, with a determination that goes beyond the usual calculation of cost and benefits: if he considers that a case should be pursued, He will not notice the consequences. He has not wavered when it comes to convicting war criminals during his service at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague; nor by pursuing street gang members in violent nineties New York, investigating police malpractice, or scrutinizing the engineering of financial crimes. But to deal with Trump, more than audacity, Smith will need guts. The same ones that probably encourage him in the triathlons in which he participates (in places like Germany, Brazil, Canada or Denmark) or in his demanding bike rides.

When U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland contacted Smith, 54, last year, he and his team had just convicted Salih Mustafa, a former Kosovar guerrilla leader, and were preparing to try the country's former president, the popular Hashim Thaci — backed by Democratic and Republican administrations — for atrocities committed during the 1998-1999 conflict. After a first experience in The Hague in 2008, Smith was in charge of the ICC's special section for Kosovo from 2015 until last autumn. But when he received Garland's offer to oversee the cases against Trump, he did not think twice: if he had forged his career winning tough cases against corrupt mobsters and cops in New York, and later against war criminals – quasi-heroes in his country, the architects of his independence – he was not going to shy away from causes whose development seems sung. The prosecutor himself has pointed out this Friday that the one of the papers will be a brief trial.

No known political affiliation; A total athlete sometimes battered by the challenges he faces, Smith was appointed with the intention of concluding the investigation before the primaries for the 2024 presidential elections take off. He thus returned through the front door to the Department of Justice, where his career began: when accepting the offer, he stressed that he felt more personal and professional commitment to the Department than to the Hague Tribunal, even if it meant leaving cases halfway, like Thaci's. A spectacular bicycle accident delayed his return to Washington by two months, until December.

Smith is a mixture of firmness and courage, plus greater doses of perseverance, virtues that he demonstrated during his investigation of Kosovar leaders by stopping all the pressures received, also from the Trump White House. "Impartial, determined, energetic, focused" on investigating the facts "wherever they lead," Garland defined him in announcing his appointment. A Harvard graduate, he began his career as an assistant prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney's Office in 1994 and became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York in 1999. In the latter position, he worked for nine years with bloody cases, such as those related to street gangs, and investigated police killings and civil rights violations. From 2010 to 2015, he led the Justice Department's public integrity section, leading a team of more than 30 prosecutors dedicated to corruption and election crimes across the country. A position close in content to his current task of scrutinizing Trump's tricks, and during which he investigated three elected officials among thirty processes.

As a prosecutor in New York, he also tried numerous cases of financial crimes, very common in the courts of the global capital of finance. That versatility, his experience in white-collar crimes and bloody mafia crimes, has bolstered his reputation: he is as capable of getting charges dropped on an innocent defendant as he is of getting a guilty person convicted who doesn't look like it. "If the case is prosecutable, he will take it forward. He's fearless," a colleague who met him when they were both New York prosecutors told Reuters on Friday. One of his mentors was longtime Manhattan prosecutor Robert Morgenthau, known for his harassment of mob bosses.

Smith has doled out justice left and right. Helped prosecute one of the officers involved in a high-profile police brutality case in 1997; the victim, Haitian Abner Louima, was sodomized by several officers with a broomstick after being arrested. He also secured a murder conviction of the leader of a drug gang that murdered two plainclothes officers in New York. His experience at the newly established special tribunal for Kosovo gives him the ability to set the rules of the game and decide when to follow them and when to improvise. "It's not the easiest decision in the world. You really have to have confidence in yourself," David Schwendiman, his predecessor at the Kosovo court, said in January. "And you have to be bold enough to make the decision."

Under his watch, grand juries convened in Washington have been subpoenaing witnesses for months. For someone with a Manichean conception of life like the former president, fond of labeling with his basic, dichotomous language (loser, loser; hater), Smith's circumspection must be unbearable. "His wife [filmmaker Katy Chevigny] is a Trump hater, he himself is a Trump hater," the Republican wrote on Friday, in the third person as if he were a pontiff or a Roman emperor, in Truth Social, along with a photo of Smith, stirring again the specter of the political persecution of which he claims to be the object (the fact that Chevigny filmed a documentary about Michelle Obama confirms according to the Republican the political hunting). Smith's rejoinder, in an appearance before the media that same day, could not be more sober: "We have a set of laws and they apply to anyone." That is, everyone. Also to former presidents.

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