Dressed like a parental chaperone at Coachella trying way too hard to look cool, Jack Smith slowly traversed through a crowd attending a Maryland music festival over the weekend—and doing his best to get noticed. The disgraced special counsel sported a “No Kings” t-shirt and mustard-colored cargo-ish pants while carrying a beer as he attempted to get toward the front of the crowd to watch washed up rockers such as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Morello rage against the president.
A handful of spectators swooned over Smith’s appearance at the event:
David Grohl, lead singer of the Foo Fighters, referred to Smith as his “hero” and “new friend.”
But to everyone familiar with the former special counsel’s dirty, corrupt, and unconstitutional operation, Smith wearing a “No Kings” shirt represented the height of hypocrisy; for two years, Smith led a tyrannical crusade—assisted by his higher-ups at the Biden Department of Justice or federal judges responsible for stopping such unabated power—to trample individual rights, constitutional protections, and the “rule of law” that Smith so often pretends to demonstrate his fealty to in a massive effort to destroy President Trump and the entire MAGA movement.
Talk about a monarchy.
What is this Creep Looking For?
A steady drip of disclosures by the Trump administration and GOP Congressional committees, however, continue to prove that Smith acted as the unelected and accountable leader of his own powerful fiefdom. Taking the reins of an office carved out specifically for him without the consent of the public or members of Congress—an office later declared unconstitutional by a courageous federal judge unbeholden to the DOJ’s chokehold on the American system of justice at the time—Smith wasted no time in creating an elaborate surveillance apparatus that surely would make Vlad Putin, or any other dictator, blush with envy.
In creepy voyeuristic fashion, Smith spied on Trump, his family members, his closest advisors, dozens of White House officials, top Republican leaders in both the House and Senate, and influential members of the media. Even creepier was Smith’s court battle in 2023 to obtain the president’s entire Twitter account including draft messages, purchases made from the account, and deleted posts, which I wrote about here.
Now, thanks to the latest releases out of the White House Government Transparency Task Force, it appears Smith also conducted a massive spy operation against Susie Wiles, Trump’s longtime advisor and the campaign manager for his 2024 presidential run. Armed with a pen register—presumably not the only one—Smith monitored all of Wiles’ phone calls in real time during early 2023 related to the criminal investigation into the president for mishandling classified documents. (I suspect that former DC Chief Judge Beryl Howell, whose dirty fingerprints are all over the lawfare against Trump dating back to Robert Mueller’s probe, signed the first pen register and current Chief Judge Jeb Boasberg authorized follow-up requests.)
While the surveillance did not reveal the content of the calls, it did give Smith and his team of henchmen access to all of Wiles’ phone activity during a critical period when Trump remained under federal three criminal investigations—two of which resulted in indictments—while preparing his run for president.
The call logs contained Wiles’ contact with the president, members of the news media, and several unnamed attorneys over a period of months. Smith’s team interviewed Wiles on April 7, 2023 in Florida; a few days later, according to an FBI memo, agents “reviewed WILES’s (sic) telephonic activity to determine contacts of interest on the date of her FBI interview.”
This Wasn’t About Finding a Few Government Files
In March 2023, the FBI captured the dates, times, and length of calls between Wiles and an unidentified lawyer. The calls occurred a few weeks after the FBI opened “Plasmic Echo,” the codename for the documents investigation. (I speculated on X that the unnamed lawyer might have been Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s defense lawyers in the documents case and the current Attorney General.)
Records also show that the Biden DOJ then Jack Smith, who took over the investigation in November 2022, ordered tech companies to preserve email records for Wiles, Kash Patel, and a separate unidentified lawyer.
This means that the DOJ spied on Trump’s 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns by using corrupt, partisan actors—from James Comey and John Brennan to Jack Smith and his collection of thugs—to criminalize the political activity of the leading Republican candidate for president and his campaign team. (Biden’s DOJ also successfully criminalized Trump’s, and others, conduct related to the 2020 election.)
Speaking of Brennan, it appears Smith might again have landed himself in some hot water. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley pointedly asked Smith during his sworn testimony whether he had received any “consultation or counsel” from the former CIA chief, who is currently under investigation himself in the “grand conspiracy” matter ongoing in southern Florida.
Smith’s response:
But as usual, slippery Smith was too cute by half. Smith’s top prosecutors in the documents case, according to an FBI memo, met with Brennan at CIA headquarters in November 2023. The purported reason for the meeting was to “discuss expert testimony to National Defense Information in the forthcoming trial.”
That trial, thankfully, never happened. Cannon dismissed the documents indictment against the president in July 2024, sparing the country more grungy appearances by attention-hungry Smith and more abuses by him and his henchmen.
Smith’s appearance at the weekend music fest does appear to signal he may not be too worried about consequences for his actions. Let’s hope he’s wrong again.
So Senator Grassley's staff hands him the list of questions and he dutifully reads them mindlessly out loud, ignoring the responses, ignoring the obvious follow up questions. Is he senile? Or, does he even understand? Of does he even care?
Speaking of follow up questions, when Senator Marsha Blackburn asked then Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown what is a woman and Ms. Brown declared her ignorance of basic biology, I was so upset with Marsha Blackburn for not asking, "Well, President Biden promised to nominate only a black woman to the high court. Did he fulfill that promise with your nomination? If your answer is yes, how do you know and how can we tell? If your answer is no, can you explain why not? And if your answer is 'I don't know', why are you a nominee to the Supreme Court?'' Talk about a high fast ball right over the middle of the plate. I screamed at the TV when Senator Blackburn didn't follow up. Inexcusable and the same is true for Senator Grassley.
I feel fairly safe in suggesting that Mr. Smith didn’t spy on Biden or Garland. I know I’m swinging for the fences in a wiffleball game, but “I got hairy legs, man!”