October 29, 2025 – Stunning report in Washington Post indicts Jack Smith

In Email/Dossier/Govt Corruption Investigations, Featured Timeline Entries by Katie Weddington

Stunning report about Jack Smith in WashPo today. Confirms Smith’s obsessed pursuit of Donald Trump.

Despite recovering from a shattered leg after a bike accident in the Netherlands, where he was prosecuting a case at the Hague, Smith took on the role of special counsel in Nov 2022.

He could not travel for six weeks so we paid for DOJ prosecutors to fly to Amsterdam to meet with Smith, who was running the investigations outside of the US. (How is this possible?)

“In February, Smith told a small group of advisers that he had instructed a deputy to begin drafting a prosecution memo — an internal document that outlined the legal reasoning and strength of the evidence to charge the former president in the documents case. Smith hadn’t made a final decision but wanted to be prepared to move forward.”

But debate ensued over where to pursue an indictment. Some prosecutors wanted to continue the case in Washington DC; the DOJ then Smith conducted the entirety of the docs investigation in the Trump-hating DC courthouse, first under the supervision of Beryl Howell then by Jeb Boasberg, two Obama appointees with a history of Trump animus.

Of course, ALL of it should have happened in southern Florida, the scene of the alleged crime. (The indictment alleged the criminal conspiracy and obstruction began on Jan 21, 2021, after the president left the White House.) But DOJ knew they would not get the same favorable outcomes in Florida as they received in DC.

In the end, they secured the indictment in southern Florida–reports indicated prosecutors merely read transcripts of the DC proceedings in the docs case to a Florida grand jury to get the indictment.

They also were scared Judge Aileen Cannon–who had appointed a special master in Sept 2022 to vet all the evidence collected at Mar-a-Lago because she did not trust the Biden DOJ/FBI and for good reason–would get the case. (Her special master appointment was reversed by the appellate court.)

Which she did.

Cannon–as I reported for a year–made life difficult for Jack Smith and his team of thugs by simply following the law and the process. The WashPo disclosed that in an August 2023 sealed order, Cannon launched an investigation into prosecutorial misconduct. At one point in 2024, Cannon warned she would remove David Harbach, one of Smith’s henchmen in the docs case, for his open hostility toward her in court.

After Cannon dismissed the docs indictment in July 2024 after concluding Smith’s appointment violated the Constitution, the special counsel wanted to seek Cannon’s recusal.

“He also asked [Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar] if he could seek to have Cannon removed by the appellate court, an unprecedented move for a special counsel.” Prelogar said no.

Unbelievable.

Here’s the report from the WaPost:

David Raskin (Credit: LinkedIn)

Federal prosecutor David Raskin was expecting that the criminal case he had helped build against former president Donald Trump would be filed in Washington, D.C., when a colleague bumped into him with surprising news: Their boss, special counsel Jack Smith, had decided to bring the case in Florida.

“Are you all f—ing insane?” Raskin blurted out to his fellow prosecutor on that spring day in 2023, in a hallway at a Justice Department building in D.C.

Raskin, who had been investigating Trump for keeping dozens of classified documents at his Palm Beach home and social club, was alarmed by what he saw as a huge gamble. In Florida, the case could wind up before U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump-appointed jurist who had already temporarily blocked federal agents from reviewing sensitive records seized from Trump’s club during the investigation.

Smith and his top deputies had concluded that trying the case in Florida put them on firmer legal ground, reducing the risk of the most serious charges being overturned on appeal. And members of their team had initially calculated that there was just a 1 in 6 chance that a case in Florida would land in Cannon’s courtroom.

“I’m not worried about Florida,” Smith said later when presenting his decision to Justice Department officials.

But the early calculation of the odds that Cannon would get the case — and Smith’s faith that the evidence could win her over even after she did — turned out to be wrong.

This prosecution was illegal enough to begin with even without the proposed illegal venue shopping that was ultimately shot down.

Prosecutors like Raskin were absolutely rabid about securing a conviction, the law be damned.

Prosecutors have discretion over where to bring a charge, as long as some of the alleged criminal conduct occurred in the district where the case is pursued. Pearce put together an analysis that convinced Smith that Florida was the best choice. But before Smith briefed Garland, word of the planned shift began to spread among his team.

Raskin heard about it in the hallway from Bratt.

“What?” Raskin said, sounding surprised.

“Yeah, Jack has decided,” Bratt said.

The case law generally favored the prosecutors bringing the charges in Florida, where the conduct at the heart of the case had occurred. Smith had talked it over with his inner circle, as well as with Bratt, and all had agreed.

“It makes sense. I’ll explain it to you,” Bratt said, referencing Pearce’s analysis.

Matthew Olsen (Credit: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Raskin disagreed, and his gut instincts were nothing to scoff at. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, who had overseen the documents probe before Smith’s appointment, had asked Raskin to join the case for a reason. Raskin, then 59, had an impressive batting average in trials. While Smith had very little experience in prosecuting cases related to national security or classified records, Raskin had a lot. But the special counsel was only seeking the advice of his top deputies.

Raskin soon got a copy of Pearce’s analysis and agreed it leaned toward bringing the charges in Florida. But “so what?” Raskin asked Bratt. Prosecutors made their own venue decisions all the time. Whether the law favored going to Florida or not, Raskin told teammates, they first had to ensure their case had the best chance of being heard by someone impartial. Given what the prosecution team saw as her track record of disregarding precedent, Cannon getting the case was too enormous a risk to ignore, he said.

“This is an existential threat to the case,” Raskin told them.

Cooler heads ultimately prevailed, but only because Smith was worried about delays in the case in his rush to try it before the election (and the chance a conviction could get thrown out):

Smith’s team feared that any convictions they won in D.C. might be appealed on the grounds that the alleged crimes occurred in Florida. And even before a trial, Smith’s team thought it was likely that Trump’s lawyers would file a motion to move the case to Florida, potentially setting a trial back by several months.

Incredibly, Smith ran the prosecution from a hospital bed in his living room in Amsterdam.

On Nov. 14, Garland called Smith to gauge his willingness to oversee the Trump investigations. Garland knew Smith had just been in a bicycle accident in the Netherlands but had no idea how severely he was injured. Smith, a triathlete, was that day lying in a hospital bed, about to undergo a second operation to reconstruct his shattered leg, which emergency technicians had described as moving like a noodle. Nonetheless, Smith told Garland he would accept the job if asked.

Trump’s announcement the next day that he would seek another term sent Garland’s office right back to Smith. But the attorney general’s senior staff recognized a potential issue. Following the operation, Smith had been prescribed powerful painkillers, and they worried the sedatives could compromise Smith’s ability to legally take the oath of office. Smith decided to leave no doubt about his mental state: He discharged himself from the hospital against doctor’s orders. At home, he went cold turkey, taking no prescription drugs before Garland announced his appointment on Nov. 18.

For the next six weeks, Smith could not fly and could barely leave his home in Amsterdam. He ran the investigations into the former U.S. president from the first floor of his home, where a metal hospital bed had been set up for him to sleep in place of his family’s kitchen table.

To save time, instead of assembling a new team, he relied on more than a dozen prosecutors and FBI agents already working on the two cases from inside the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. Among them were attorneys Smith knew and trusted from his time leading the Justice Department’s vaunted Public Integrity Section, set up after Watergate with a broad mandate to investigate public corruption. Smith elevated one former staffer of that unit, J.P. Cooney, to be his deputy, and in November and December 2022 Cooney and others traveled to Smith’s home in Amsterdam to bring him up to speed first on the election-interference probe and then on the documents investigation.

According to the Post, Smith and his team also miscalculated the odds they would draw Judge Cannon.

Senior counselors followed up with Smith’s staff and in the following days reported back that the concerns seemed sound. Some members of Smith’s team, they reported, had also analyzed the likelihood Cannon would get the case, calculating the odds that she would be randomly assigned to oversee it at just 1 in 6.

But before a final decision was made, the team members realized they had not fully accounted for a key factor: judges’ caseloads in the Florida district. Reexamining the pool of potential South Florida judges, they found that some judges located closest to Mar-a-Lago did not work full time or had trials scheduled that would limit their availability.

The real chance of drawing Cannon was far higher, nearly 1 in 3, they calculated.

This case had no shot of standing up with a fair judge that would not blatantly favor the prosecutors like so many of them do.

A thunderstorm was rolling in over Miami that afternoon, darkening the sky. Sometime between 5 and 5:30 p.m., Smith’s team learned from the federal court’s website which judge had been assigned to the case. Some gasped seeing the initials at the top of the docket: “AMC,” for Aileen Mercedes Cannon.

Bratt called Olsen.

“You’re not going to believe it,” Bratt said. “We got Cannon.”

“We’re screwed,” Olsen said.

Bratt also notified Smith, who was back in Washington with many of the team members. Smith didn’t really react but thanked him for the update.

The deep state career prosecutors were despondent, according to the Post. Smith had to do some “hand-holding” of these emotional theater kids:

On Friday, June 9, the next day, Smith’s trusted inner circle was insisting in phone calls to officials at Justice Department headquarters that everything would be fine.

Garland, however, was nervous, staffers sensed. Cannon had acted so erratically, prosecutors felt, issuing unexpected rulings following the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, that no one could say if or how she might jam up and delay the government’s case.

Bratt poked his head into Smith’s office.

“This is really not good,” he said.

“We’ll see. We’ll see,” Smith replied. “We don’t know yet. Give her a chance.”

Smith seemed to recognize the seismic shift in the case, however, and the need to do some hand-holding, which was atypical for him. That Friday, the special counsel went from office to office, giving one-on-one pep talks to members of the classified-documents team — some of them despondent. He told them not to forget all the hard work they had put in to gather the evidence, and that now they needed to present their best case.

“We’ve got to keep our focus and hope for the best,” Smith told them.

The Biden DOJ refused to let Smith go after the judge and try to get her recused, much to Smith’s chagrin:

In August 2024, as Smith and his team were finishing up their appeal of Cannon’s ruling, he had also secretly concluded that Cannon should be removed as the presiding judge. Smith presented the appeal to Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar for her approval, as special counsel regulations required. He also asked her if he could seek to have Cannon removed by the appellate court, an unprecedented move for a special counsel.

[…]

Prelogar approved the appeal of Cannon’s ruling but rejected Smith’s plan to seek the judge’s removal, saying he didn’t have a strong enough basis to do so. Smith decided not to ask Garland to overrule Prelogar. If Smith had asked and Garland then turned him down, the Justice Department would have been required to notify Congress, and the disagreement would have surely become public.

What a sad and sordid chapter of our nation’s history.

Read the whole report…

(Revolver News, 10/29/2025)  (Archive)