Smith, Jack (Attorney)

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    Trump’s Justice Dept. Speech Shows a Renewed Quest for Vengeance

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    Presidents and prosecutors have for generations appeared in the Great Hall of the Justice Department to announce important anti-crime initiatives or to offer plaudits for the fundamental tenet of the rule of law, while maintaining distance from the detailed workings of the department itself.When President Bill Clinton addressed the Great Hall in 1993, he used the occasion to discuss the crime bill he was trying to push through Congress. Eight years later, when President George W. Bush appeared there to dedicate the building in honor of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he declared that everyone who worked at the department did so to “serve the public in the cause of justice.”But when President Trump appeared in the gilded room on Friday afternoon, he did something different: He delivered a grievance-filled attack on the very people who have worked in the building and others like them. As he singled out some targets of his rage, he appeared to offer his own vision of justice in America, one defined by personal vengeance rather than by institutional principles.“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” Mr. Trump said. “They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third-world country, but in the end, the thugs failed and the truth won.”Among those Mr. Trump lashed out at were Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who took the lead in fighting his attempts to challenge his loss in the 2020 election, and Mark F. Pomerantz, a prosecutor who worked on an early version of a criminal case against him in Manhattan; efforts in the case ultimately led to Mr. Trump’s conviction last year on dozens of state felony charges.His anger rising, Mr. Trump went on to assail Mr. Pomerantz’s former boss, Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, and the former special counsel, Jack Smith, who had accused him in separate criminal indictments of illegally holding on to classified materials and of using lies and fraud to remain in office at the end of his last term in the White House.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Expands Attacks on Law Firms, Singling Out Paul, Weiss

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      President Trump on Friday opened a third attack against a private law firm, restricting the business activities of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison just days after a federal judge ruled such measures appeared to violate the Constitution.White House officials said the president signed an executive order to suspend security clearances held by people at the firm, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest. The order also seeks to sharply limit Paul, Weiss employees from entering government buildings, getting government jobs or receiving any money from federal contracts, according to a fact sheet provided by the Trump administration.The text of the order was not immediately available, but a White House fact sheet said the order intended to punish the firm generally, and one of its former lawyers specifically, Mark F. Pomerantz.Mr. Trump mentioned Mr. Pomerantz by name in an angry speech Friday at the Justice Department, where he complained about prosecutors and private lawyers who pursued cases against him, calling them “really bad people.” Mr. Trump, in the same speech, claimed he was ending the “weaponization” of the Justice Department, though his move against the firm showed he will continue using his power to exact retribution on his opponents.Mr. Pomerantz had tried to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump several years ago when he worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The White House announcement called Mr. Pomerantz “an unethical lawyer” who tried to “manufacture a prosecution against President Trump.”A spokesperson for the firm said in a written statement that Mr. Pomerantz retired from the firm in 2012 and had not been affiliated with it for years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      F.B.I. Returns Materials Taken From Mar-a-Lago to Trump

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      Among the items taken from the president’s Florida residence were files that investigators said contained classified material and formed the central evidence in one of the criminal cases against him.The F.B.I. on Friday gave President Trump the boxes of materials the bureau had seized during a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in 2022, the White House announced.Files that investigators said contained classified material were among the thousands of items taken in the search, and they had formed the central evidence in a criminal case charging Mr. Trump with illegally taking them when he left office after his first term and blocking the government’s efforts to retrieve them.But a judge unexpectedly threw out the charges last year, and prosecutors dropped their appeal to reinstate them after Mr. Trump was re-elected in November. Jack Smith, the special counsel in the case, said at the time that the charges had been dismissed because of a department policy that barred filing charges against a sitting president.Mr. Trump repeatedly argued that he had a legal right to the documents despite their classification. After the case was dropped, the president and his allies said they would seek the return of the files that had been seized.Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said that happened Friday afternoon.“The F.B.I. is giving the president his property back that was taken during the unlawful and illegal raids,” Mr. Cheung said. “We are taking possession of the boxes today and loading them onto Air Force One.”Mr. Cheung told reporters that the boxes of materials taken from Mar-a-Lago were loaded onto Air Force One before the president’s departure for Mar-a-Lago on Friday evening. Alina Habba, the counselor to the president, told reporters that the boxes included personal items from Mr. Trump and his family.In his own statement, the president said he wanted to make the materials “part of the Trump Presidential Library.”“The Department of Justice has just returned the boxes that deranged Jack Smith made such a big deal about,” he said, adding, “I did absolutely nothing wrong.” More

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      Trump Says He Would Have Had a ‘Very Nasty Life’ if He’d Lost the Election

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      President Trump said Wednesday he would have had a “very nasty life” if he lost the presidential election, a surprisingly public acknowledgment that his legal challenges could have consumed his life and brought jail time.“If I lost, it would have been very bad,” Mr. Trump said at an investment summit in Miami Beach. “It was dangerous, actually very dangerous.”When Mr. Trump won in November, the Justice Department abandoned the two federal cases against him, and a judge in Manhattan issued an unconditional discharge in his hush money case.Mr. Trump gave voice to something that his advisers had long said he had in the back of his mind as he campaigned. But he did not publicly acknowledge throughout 2024 that he was campaigning for his freedom as much as for the White House itself.The president made the comments in response to a question about how he would spend a year if granted a sabbatical. Mr. Trump did not directly answer the question, saying he was honored to be president. But he said it took “a certain amount of courage” to run again because of the personal risks.Mr. Trump also said he disagreed with historians’ assessment that Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated, were the two most mistreated presidents.“Nobody was treated like me,” he said. “Nobody, and I will tell you, you learn a lot about yourself, but there’s nothing I’d rather do.”During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump faced dozens of criminal charges across four different cases. Jack Smith, who served as a special counsel, charged him in two different cases, one related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and another related to his handling of classified government documents after he left the White House in 2021. The documents case had been dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge, but Mr. Smith’s team was appealing it.He also faced charges in Georgia over attempts to overturn his election loss in 2020, and he was found guilty on all counts in the hush-money case in New York, where he could have faced up to four years in prison.Maggie Haberman More

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      End of Trump Cases Leaves Limits on Presidential Criminality Unclear

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      Donald J. Trump is set to regain office without clarity on the scope of presidential immunity and with a lingering cloud over whether outside special counsels can investigate high-level wrongdoing.The end of the two federal criminal cases against President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday left momentous, unsettled questions about constraints on criminal wrongdoing by presidents, from the scope of presidential immunity to whether the Justice Department may continue to appoint outside special counsels to investigate high-level wrongdoing.Both cases against Mr. Trump — for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his later hoarding of classified government documents and obstruction of efforts to retrieve them — were short-circuited by the fact that he won the 2024 election before they could be definitively resolved.Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought both cases against Mr. Trump, asked courts on Monday to shut them down. The prosecutor cited the Justice Department’s longstanding view that the Constitution implicitly grants temporary immunity to sitting presidents, lest any prosecution distract them from their official duties.The result is not just that Mr. Trump appears set to escape any criminal accountability for his actions. (Mr. Smith left the door open to, in theory, refiling the charges after Mr. Trump leaves office, but the statute of limitations is likely to have run by then.) It also means that two open constitutional questions the cases have raised appear likely to go without definitive answers as Mr. Trump takes office.One is the extent of the protection from prosecution offered to former presidents by the Supreme Court’s ruling this summer establishing that they have a type of broad but not fully defined immunity for official acts taken while in office.The other is whether, when a president is suspected of committing crimes, the Justice Department can avoid conflicts of interest by bringing in an outside prosecutor to lead a semi-independent investigation into the matter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Trump’s Win Helps Him Fight Off His Legal Charges

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      By triumphing at the ballot box, Donald Trump can dispense with federal charges against him while postponing or derailing other pending cases that have dogged him.For all that former President Donald J. Trump’s election to a second term was a remarkable political comeback, it was also the culmination of an audacious and stunningly successful legal strategy that could allow him to evade accountability for the array of charges against him.The string of accusations lodged during the two years of Mr. Trump’s candidacy, seemingly enough to end the career of almost any politician, became in his hands a fund-raising bonanza and a rallying cry, a deep pool of fuel for his rage and a call to demand retribution. The intensity of his campaign fed off the recognition that his personal freedom could be on the line.He was indicted not just once but twice for plotting to overturn the last election. He was accused of mishandling national security secrets and obstruction. He was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation, and for inflating his net worth. And he was found guilty of criminal charges stemming from a hush money payment to a porn star.Throughout it all, however, starting with his first indictment in the hush money case, legal proceedings that were meant to hold him to account only seemed to strengthen his support. His political standing strengthened, he was relentless in fighting off some charges, delaying a trial on others and banking on the election itself to settle what he could not win in the courtroom.The Justice Department has taken the position under administrations of both parties that prosecutors cannot pursue criminal charges against a sitting president to avoid interfering with his performance of his constitutional duties. That is a legal principle that the Trump administration Justice Department and his defense lawyers will surely press state courts and local prosecutors to adhere to as well.The result is that the decision by voters this week to return Mr. Trump to the White House could lead all or many of the proceedings against him to be postponed or derailed altogether.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Secret Files in Election Case Show How Judges Limited Trump’s Privilege

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      The partly unsealed rulings, orders and transcripts open a window on a momentous battle over grand jury testimony that played out in secret, creating important precedents about executive privilege.Court documents unsealed on Monday shed new light on a legal battle over which of former President Donald J. Trump’s White House aides had to testify before a grand jury in Washington that charged him with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, showing how judges carved out limits on executive privilege.The trove — including motions, judicial orders and transcripts of hearings in Federal District Court in Washington — did not reveal significant new details about Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power. But it did open a window on important questions of presidential power and revealed how judges grew frustrated with Mr. Trump’s longstanding strategy of seeking to delay accountability for his attempts to overturn his defeat to Joseph R. Biden Jr.The documents also created important — if not binding — precedents about the scope of executive privilege that could influence criminal investigations in which a current or former president instructs subordinates not to testify before a grand jury based on his constitutional authority to keep certain internal executive branch communications secret.Starting in the summer of 2022, and continuing with the appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel later that year, the Justice Department undertook a wide-ranging and extraordinary effort to compel grand jury testimony from several close aides to Mr. Trump. Prosecutors believed the aides had critical information about the former president’s attempts to overturn the results of the election.The effort, which ended in the spring of the following year, was largely intended to obtain firsthand accounts from key figures who had used claims of executive privilege and other legal protections to avoid testifying to investigators on the House committee that examined the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the events leading up to it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Rally in Michigan Dominated by More False Statements

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      Former President Donald J. Trump held a rally on Thursday in the key battleground state of Michigan that was notable mainly for his continued false statements and exaggerations on a number of subjects as varied as the 2020 election and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene.In the roughly 85 minutes that Mr. Trump was onstage, he repeated a pattern of untrue assertions that have characterized many of his events as the 2024 presidential race heads into its final weeks. The crowd of supporters in Saginaw County, which he narrowly lost four years ago, included Mike Rogers, the former Michigan congressman and the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, and Pete Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican Party chairman.Mr. Trump reiterated his familiar false claim that he had won the 2020 election and made no acknowledgment of new evidence that was unsealed against him on Wednesday in the federal election subversion case. He also said his campaign was up in all polls in every swing state, while several public polls show close races and Vice President Kamala Harris leading narrowly in a number of battlegrounds.Mr. Trump also mischaracterized the state of funding at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saying that the Biden administration had stolen disaster-relief money allocated to the agency to give to housing for undocumented immigrants so they would vote for Democrats.He cast electric cars as a threat to the auto industry, while at the same time praising Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive who has endorsed his candidacy and featured him prominently on X, the Musk-owned social media platform.Michigan was one of a handful of swing states where Mr. Trump and his allies tried to overturn his defeat in 2020 through a series of maneuvers that included breaching voting equipment and seeking to seat a set of fake presidential electors. Some of his supporters have been criminally charged in the state, where Mr. Trump was named as an unindicted co-conspirator this year.Mr. Trump spent time in his speech taking satisfaction over his choice of running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, whose debate performance this week was applauded by many.“I drafted the best athlete,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Vance. The audience — several thousand supporters at a recreation center at Saginaw Valley State University, roughly 100 miles north of Detroit — cheered.And he mused, at one point, that instead of being on a beach in Monte Carlo or someplace else, he was running for the presidency again. “If I had my choice of being here with you today or being on some magnificent beach with the waves hitting me in the face, I would take you every single time.”Overall as of Thursday, Ms. Harris led by two percentage points in Michigan, according to The New York Times’s polling average, 49 percent to 47 percent. The vice president is scheduled to return to the state on Friday, campaigning in Detroit and Flint. More

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      Four Takeaways From Jack Smith’s Brief in the Trump Election Case

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      The special counsel provided new details that help flesh out how Donald Trump sought to remain in power, while setting out his argument for the case to survive the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.The special counsel who has charged former President Donald J. Trump with a criminal conspiracy over his attempt to overturn his loss of the 2020 election has filed a lengthy brief laying out his key evidence along with an argument for why the case should be able to go forward despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in July on presidential immunity.Here are some key takeaways from the 165-page brief, which a judge largely unsealed on Wednesday:The prosecutor revealed new evidence.The brief contained far more detail than the indictment and included many specific allegations that were not previously part of the public record of the events leading up to the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.None of the new details were game-changing revelations, but they add further texture to the available history. For example, part of the brief focuses on a social media post that Mr. Trump sent on the afternoon of the attack on the Capitol, telling supporters that Vice President Mike Pence had let them all down.Mr. Trump was sitting alone in the dining room off the Oval Office at the time. According to the brief, forensic data shows he was using the Twitter app on his phone and watching Fox News. Fox had just interviewed a man who was frustrated that Mr. Pence was not blocking the certification and then reported that a police officer may have been injured and the protesters had breached the Capitol.Rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesMr. Trump posted to Twitter that Mr. Pence had lacked the “courage” to do what was right. The mob became enraged at the vice president, and the Secret Service took him to a secure location. An aide to Mr. Trump rushed in to alert him to the peril Mr. Pence was in, but Mr. Trump looked at the aide and said only, “So what?” according to the brief.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More