Before being named the special counsel tasked with investigating Donald Trump, Jack Smith in his role as an international war crimes prosecutor gained unique insight into the authoritarian leader’s playbook for beating criminal charges that the former president is currently using, a geopolitics expert writes for The New York Times.
Smith, during his work at The Hague and at the International Criminal Court, was involved in the prosecution of political leaders who sought to shield themselves from justice by rallying their supporters with the threat of violence or unrest.
Princeton University professor of politics and international affairs Gary J. Bass writes for The New York Times that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric against Smith and other law enforcement officials investigating him fit a pattern that those involved in prosecuting political figures have to contend with.
Bass writes, “There are two competing visions of national and international justice at play in Mr. Smith’s investigation of Mr. Trump. One is the lofty principle that even presidents and prime ministers must answer to the law. The other is the reality that such powerful leaders can try to secure their own impunity by decrying justice as a sham and rallying their followers, threatening instability and violent backlash.
"These tensions have defined the history of international war crimes prosecutions; they marked Mr. Smith’s achievements in court; they are already at play in Mr. Trump’s attempts to thwart the rule of law.”
Trump has repeatedly made incendiary remarks against Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, among others.
Bass writes that from “From Kenya to Kosovo, Mr. Smith presumably knows all too well how an indicted politician can mobilize his loyalists to defy and obstruct a prosecution,” and that Trump is following their playbook to the letter, likening Trump’s comparison of FBI agents investigating him to the Gestapo to the methods other authoritarian leaders use to skirt justice.
Bass concludes that “Mr. Trump will find that Mr. Smith has dealt with the likes of him — and worse — before. The American prosecutor is well equipped to pursue the vision of a predecessor Robert H. Jackson, the eloquent Supreme Court justice who served as the U.S. chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, who declared in his opening address there: “Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance.”
