Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith has added a new member to his team in the hunt to take down former President Donald Trump, and it’s someone with a history as an anti-Trumper.
While he never bothered making any actual announcement of the appointment, Smith has brought on war crimes prosecutor Alex Whiting to help him put Trump in jail, Politico reported.
Smith has worked with Whiting before. According to Politico, the pair prosecuted crimes against humanity together at the Hague in the late 1990s.
Whiting has worked as a prosecutor with the International Criminal Court and with the DOJ in Boston, where he specialized in organized crime.
He was also hired by then-Dean Elena Kagan to teach at Harvard Law School. Kagan, of course, now sits on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Smith has not revealed what role Whiting will serve on his prosecutorial staff, and Whiting has not commented on his addition to the team.
Whiting comes to Smith’s team as a clear partisan, though.
He wrote articles and gave interviews in support of Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign, insisting that Mueller had the goods on Trump. We now know that Mueller had nothing.
Whiting is also a Democratic donor. According to Open Secrets, he has donated thousands to Democrats over the years, including to extreme leftists such as Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama.
This guy– Alex Whiting– is a DEMOCRAT donor. Here’s just a sample of his political donations… https://t.co/82I6eJWeEd pic.twitter.com/4YIbzkT92u
— Steven Cheung (@TheStevenCheung) September 22, 2023
Smith clearly has no interest in treating Trump fairly, so his appointment of Whiting hardly comes as a surprise. Besides, he needs all the help he can get.
He recently suffered a setback in his Jan. 6 case when a three-judge panel in Washington, D.C., ruled that the special counsel could not have access to the phone records of Rep. Scott Perry, a Trump ally.
The ruling was Smith’s third strike in his cases against the former president.
In August, the Florida judge overseeing the confidential documents case struck down two of Smith’s filings, Axios reported at the time.
And in July, Smith’s team had to admit that they hadn’t turned over all relevant evidence to Trump’s lawyers, despite previously claiming that they had.
Meanwhile, Smith was attempting to get the courts to clamp down on Trump’s free speech by slapping a gag order on the former president.
Maybe Smith is hoping that Whiting can help right the ship. Regardless, it seems unlikely that his addition will make the prosecution any less nakedly biased.
