As the Justice Department presses charges against some of Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies amid his retribution push, the former prosecutor who built two criminal cases against the president is back on his radar.

Jack Smith, the one-time U.S. special counsel, recently reemerged in public to denounce the Trump administration’s firing of career prosecutors and its handling of politically explosive cases. The president, meanwhile, has encouraged prosecutors to look into Smith’s conduct and an ally summoned him to testify in a congressional probe.

“Deranged Jack Smith, in my opinion, is a criminal,” Trump said on Wednesday, flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi. “I hope they’re looking at all these people.”

The president has been ramping up calls for the Justice Department to turn the tables and prosecute critics and some of the people who brought legal cases against him. In recent weeks, criminal charges were filed against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Then on Thursday, prosecutors unveiled charges against John Bolton, a former adviser to Trump turned critic of the president. All three have denied wrongdoing.

After dropping the Trump cases following his election to the presidency last year, Smith vanished from public view. But during an hour-long talk last week at the University College London, Smith took aim at Trump’s Justice Department. “Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on,” he said.

‘Apolitical civil servants’

This week, Smith appeared in a promotional video for Justice Connection, a group established by ex-Justice Department officials to support its current and former employees. “As apolitical civil servants,” Smith said in the video, department employees swore an oath to the Constitution — “not to any one president or political party.”

Trump, meanwhile, has called on his allies to turn their attention to Smith. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, summoned Smith to Capitol Hill for closed-door testimony, writing in a letter on Tuesday that Smith is “ultimately responsible for the prosecutorial misconduct and constitutional abuses of your office.”

Smith is due to respond by producing relevant documents and communications from his time as special counsel through the present by Oct. 28.

Smith’s attorney did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.

Smith spent years as a federal prosecutor and senior Justice Department official before he left the U.S. in 2018 to serve as the chief prosecutor for a special court in The Hague probing war crimes in Kosovo. He returned in late 2022 when then-Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed him as special counsel to take over the criminal investigations into Trump.

Smith’s office pressed two sets of federal charges — one case in Washington accused Trump of conspiring to obstruct the 2020 election and the other in Florida alleged that he held onto classified information after leaving the White House and obstructed U.S. officials trying to get the documents back.

Neither case made it to trial. Smith dropped his pursuit of both cases after Trump won the election, relying on the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.

Smith spoke in public only a handful of times during his tenure as special counsel. He disappeared from the spotlight after formally exiting the Justice Department days before Trump’s inauguration in January.

‘Absolutely ludicrous’

During his Oct. 8 talk in London, Smith defended his investigations into Trump and denied there was any political motivation.

“The idea that politics would play a role in big cases like this, it’s absolutely ludicrous and it’s totally contrary to my experience as a prosecutor,” he said.

Stacey Young, the executive director and founder of Justice Connection, said in an interview that it was easy to get Smith to appear in their video because “he loves the Department of Justice.”

“He expressed a strong interest in doing anything he can to be part of our effort and support what we’re doing,” Young said, adding that the group has provided support to many of Smith’s ex-colleagues “who were fired simply for doing their jobs.”

In London, Smith criticized the Trump administration for seeking to end the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams and for charging Comey, saying both of those decisions were made despite the protests and resignations of career Justice Department officials.

“The apolitical prosecutors who analyzed this said there wasn’t a case and so they brought somebody in who had never been a criminal prosecutor on days notice to secure an indictment a day before the statute of limitations ended,” Smith said of Comey’s indictment. “That just reeks of lack of process.”

Smith also rebuked the Trump administration for attacking nonpartisan public servants, saying it will have an “incalculable” cost for the country.

“That’s why, frankly, you see all these conflicts between the career apolitical prosecutors I worked with,” he added. “It’s just they’ve been doing things apolitically forever and when they’re told, ‘No, you got to get this outcome no matter what,’ that is so contrary to how we were all raised as prosecutors.”

There is still lingering court action related to Smith’s work. The Justice Department released part of Smith’s final report related to the election investigation, but the Florida judge handling the classified documents case blocked disclosure of that portion of the report.

First Amendment and liberal-leaning advocacy groups have unresolved requests for the judge to lift that order, although it would still be up to Bondi to decide whether to share it with the public.

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