BY ANDREW AMELINCKX/
On June 8, 2023, former U.S. President Donald Trump took to social media to announce a federal grand jury had indicted him in the federal investigation into the classified documents the FBI found at his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort after he left the White House. “The corrupt Biden Administration has informed my attorneys that I have been Indicted, seemingly over the Boxes Hoax. … I have been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM. … I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!” he wrote on Truth Social. Trump is facing seven charges, including obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and one under the Espionage Act, among others, per CNN.
Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have labeled the federal probe a political attack. But who is Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, the man leading the classified documents investigation? Smith has more than 30 years of experience as a prosecutor with a wide-ranging background, handling cases from violent gangs to international war criminals, per CNN and The New York Times. Politically, he’s registered as an independent and has conducted probes into both Democrats and Republicans when he headed the Justice Department’s public integrity section from 2010 to 2015, according to The Guardian.
Jack Smith was born on June 5, 1969, in Clay, a suburb of Syracuse in Central New York. He received an undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Oneonta before going on to Harvard Law School. His law career began with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office before he moved on to the federal level, also in New York City. Smith remained with the U.S. Justice Department on and off from 1999 to 2018 when he became a chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands.
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