US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Friday that Jack Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor, was appointed as special counsel to oversee the Justice Department’s probes into former president Donald Trump. Smith will oversee two probes—one on Trump's alleged role in the Capitol riots after the 2020 presidential election and the second on his handling of highly sensitive government documents.
This development comes a few days after Trump launched his 2024 presidential bid. Smith will finally decide if the former US president will face criminal charges. "In certain extraordinary cases it is in the public interest to appoint a special prosecutor to independently manage an investigation and prosecution," Garland said.
"The pace of the investigations will not pause or flag under my watch," Smith said in a statement, Reuters reported. "I will exercise independent judgment and will move the investigations forward expeditiously and thoroughly to whatever outcome the facts and the law dictate."
In a post on social media, Trump called the move ‘disgraceful’. "The Democrat Department of 'Justice' had nothing, except Trump haters, so they just appointed a Special Prosecutor to go after me further. Disgraceful,” he wrote. Speaking to Fox News, he “won’t partake” in Smith’s investigation.
In a controversial search at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August, the FBI recovered several government documents, some of them highly classified. Trump has denied any wrongdoing, and claimed he had declassified the documents in his possession. According to a report by Washington Post, the agents seized about 13,000 documents, 103 of them classified and 18 of them top secret.
