(Headline USA) Donald Trump said Thursday that if he wins the White House again, he will fire partisan and arguably illegitimate special counsel Jack Smith “within two seconds” of taking office.
Trump was asked during an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt whether he would first pardon himself or terminate Smith to remove the legal cloud hanging over him.
“It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump responded. “He’ll be one of the first things addressed.”
Smith, who was dubiously appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2022, has charged the former president over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his mishandling of classified documents.
However, the classified documents case was dismissed earlier this year by Judge Aileen Cannon after she determined, among other things, that Smith may not have been legitimately appointed as special counsel since he was not vetted or approved by Congress, violating the customary protocol.
Instead, Garland plucked the former Obama Justice Department attorney from a role at The Hague, in Europe, although his reputation as a highly political prosecutor willing to play fast and loose with the law in an “ends-justifies-the-means” approach had proceeded him in at least two high-profile Obama-era cases, neither of which ended well for Smith.
He was widely panned, yet again—along with partisan D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan—for refiling an amended complaint against Trump in the Jan. 6 case in order to effectively push derogatory information ahead of the election after failing to bring his case to trial in time.
The case was met with delays when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump and other presidents could be afforded immunity for acts that they undertook in an official capacity—effectively rebuking Smith for his overreach and Chutkan for her haste to rush it to trial without considering the legal merits.
Trump, who regularly assails Smith and has suggested before that he would fire him if he were president, called Smith a “crooked person.”
Although Trump probably would not be able to do it on his own because Smith is not a presidential appointee, he could order the Justice Department to remove Smith.
In fact, several recent reports indicated that Cannon—the judge who deemed Smith to be illegitimate—was on Trump’s shortlist for prospective attorney generals.
“We had a brave, brilliant judge in Florida,” Trump said in the interview with Hewitt.
“She’s a brilliant judge, by the way,” he continued. “I don’t know her. I never spoke to her. Never spoke to her. But we had a brave and very brilliant judge.”
During his first term as president, while being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of the Russia-collusion hoax—which later proved to have been largely cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign, in coordination with the FBI and others—Trump urged his then-White House counsel, Don McGahn, to press the Justice Department to terminate Mueller. McGahn refused.
After Trump said he would fire Smith, Hewitt raised the possibility that a Democrat-led House could, once again, impeach Trump over that move. Trump said he did not believe that would happen.
“I don’t think they’ll impeach me if I fire Jack Smith,” Trump said. “Jack Smith is a scoundrel.”
As intended, Democrat Kamala Harris’s campaign has sought to use innuendo from Smith’s lawfare attack on Trump against the Republican candidate. They released an ad earlier this month that featured video from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and headlines from Smith’s investigation.
“He knew what he was doing,” the ad shows on screen.
Much of the information that has been publicly released from Smith’s complaint has been carefully curated and cherrypicked to create a particular narrative, similar to the highly partisan House Jan. 6 Committee hearings that preceded the 2022 midterm elections.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
