Jack Smith

The reasoning, I very much agree with the reasoning in the dissent in that opinion more than the majority, but that was the law. In terms of that particular point, I would say two things. First, if you looked, and we have this if you're interested in it, it's in the final report that I wrote with my team. How you can think about these issues is on a spectrum. If you look at how the district court, the appellate court, and then the Supreme Court thought about these things, and then the dissent and the majority in the Supreme Court.

There were rule of law considerations, the things we're talking about tonight, and then there were also considerations of giving the executive enough latitude to act, and I think the word was boldly and fearlessly, that the executive would be able to lead the nation.

District Court, Appellate Court and the dissent strongly weighted the rule of law considerations. The majority opinion strongly weighted the other considerations and, to your point, brought up the scenario of, well, if you do this, then there's going to be this response. My view on that is a couple of things.

I think if you do that, it's tantamount to saying you can never prosecute powerful high officials, because there could always be a concern that they'll stay in power and then come after people. The problem is not prosecuting high officials who did something wrong when you do it according to the processes of law in your country.

It's the retaliation. That's the problem. And that's the thing that we should be preventing. And also in the history of our country, what they're talking about, when we've done that, it hasn't happened in the past. And so I disagree with that. But again, that's the reasoning behind the opinion, the ultimate opinion. The law is what it now is in terms of official acts being immune. And that's something that we have to follow.

and not have the public access to it. Same thing, and I should be clear, a lot of times in a prosecution, if there's sensitive information or the protection of witnesses, you can't make everything public if you're going to also, say, protect witnesses or protect sensitive information. But the goal should be to make as much of it public as possible and make your reasons for doing things as public as possible.

Luulen, että kun ihmiset eivät ymmärrä, mitä hallit ovat tekemässä ja eivät ymmärrä, mitä hallit ovat tekemässä, se on silloin, kun yllättäminen tapahtuu. Toinen asia, jonka ajattelen, on se, että jos haluamme yllättäminen hallituksen instituutioissamme, se liittyy kolmeen asiaan. Laitan sen hallituksen näkökulmasta, joka tiedän.

One, you have to be competent at what you do. You have to know how to do it. You have to have experience at it and talent at it. You have to be someone who actually knows the rules of your profession. The second is you have to have integrity. You have to be a truth teller and someone who can be trusted to do things for the right reasons.

Mutta kolmas asia, joka on usein haastavaa, on se, että sinun täytyy pystyä kommunikoimaan yksi ja kaksi yksikölle. Sinun täytyy pystyä pystyä lähtemään yksikölle tietoa siitä, että olet todellisuusjärjestelmä ja että tiedät oikeasti, miten tehdä tämän. Kun ei ole yksinkertaisesta prosessista, ei ole mahdollista tehdä niitä asioita. Ei ole mahdollista nähdä, oletko tyypillinen tai ei. Ja jos olet tyypillinen, ei pitäisi olla vahva yksinkertaisesta prosessista.

Special counsel Jack Smith then addresses what he views it means to be a good prosecutor, what he learned. Here, play this clip. I was taught as a young prosecutor, no fear, no favor. I was taught as a young prosecutor, you do the right things, you do it the right way and for the right reasons. And, you know, when I was a young prosecutor,

assistant district attorney in Manhattan, I thought that's what you were taught at the Manhattan DA's office. When I got to the Eastern District of New York, I was like, wow, that's the same philosophy here. We do it the same way.

When I got to the ICC and what I tried to imbue on the people in my office when I was running the last office overseas was those same sort of principles. And what I found is that public servants who want to be good public servants, wherever they are, that those are really guiding principles. If you do those three things, do the right thing, do it the right way and do it for the right reasons, if you're hitting those marks, you're going to be okay as a prosecutor.

How, if at all, does their political views or even their party affiliation factor in or not factor in to your decision about who you would bring on? Most of the people who ended up working on this investigation from the beginning to the end, when I was special counsel, were people who were already actually working on the investigations when I took over. They were working on the separate cases.

I did bring in a few people to assist. Those people I brought in were all former, longtime former federal prosecutors who had worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations over and over again. And one of the topics I really like to talk with folks about, because I don't think it's talked about enough, is the just incredible high level of integrity and competence and willingness to sacrifice to the people

who do this work. And I'm talking about the people I worked with in the special counsel's office. But the Department of Justice in the US, the FBI, are filled with people like this. And these are people who are not self-promoters. They do not like to tell their own story. They cannot start a sentence with I, they start that with we. These are team players who don't want anything but to do good in the world.

They're not interested in politics. And I get very concerned when I see how easy it is to demonize these people for political ends, when these are the very sort of people I think we should be celebrating. The people on my special counsel team were like that. The idea that politics played a role in who worked on that case or who got chosen is ludicrous. And Andrew, you know, and this is another thing that I think if you're not inside the US Department of Justice,

Ajatus, että poliitikassa olisi rooli tällaisissa isoissa tapauksissa, on täysin luonnollista, ja se on täysin samaa mieltä kuin minun kokemukseni hallituksessa. Silloin, kun olin yliopistoprosessi, kun aloitin, jos olisin kertonut kaverini DA-yhteyksessä, että minulla on tämä tapaukset, ja minä olisin saanut sen, mutta minä vain löysin tietoa, että kaveri on DA-yhteyksessä ystävä, joten ehkä voimme löytää tavoitteen, etten saa sen.

Tai jos sanoisin, etten saanut tätä tapauksia, koska se ei ole legitiivinen tapauksessa.

but I saw that he was an enemy of the DA and maybe we shouldn't bring it. My boss, my first boss, he would toss me out a window, right? Toss me out a window. When I was the chief of the public integrity section, we were doing the highest profile corruption cases around the country. I had no idea of the politics of people who worked for me because it was entirely irrelevant to our work. And that was the same when I was in Brooklyn, New York. It was the same when I was in Tennessee.

It's one of those things that I think sometimes you hear what's in the news. If you talk to anybody in the department who's been there for decades, that's just not even close to what that work is like. And I don't think that there's enough people out there saying that because the people who do that, they don't want to be out front talking about those things, putting themselves sort of in the limelight. They just want to do good work. And so the people on my team,