Special Counsel Jack Smith has added a prominent Democrat donor to his team that is prosecuting former President Donald Trump, adding more legitimacy to claims of political bias.
Smith has added a veteran war crimes prosecutor — who worked as Smith’s deputy at the Hague — to his team as it prepares to bring Trump to trial in Washington and Florida.
For three years, Alex Whiting worked alongside Smith, assisting in the prosecution of crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo in the late 1990s. From 2010 to 2013, the Yale-educated lawyer worked as a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. He has also taught law at Harvard since 2007 when he was hired as an assistant professor by then-Dean Elena Kagan, now a Supreme Court justice, and rose to the rank of visiting professor in 2013.
“Whiting’s precise role on Smith’s team is unclear. A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment, and Whiting did not immediately return requests for comment. The prosecutor’s office in the Hague and Harvard University also did not respond to requests for comment about Whiting’s current employment status,” Politico reported.
“But a POLITICO reporter observed Whiting at the U.S. district courthouse in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday and Thursday, spending several hours monitoring the trial of a Jan. 6 defendant. The judge in the case is Tanya Chutkan, who is slated to preside over Trump’s trial in March on federal charges stemming from his efforts to subvert the 2020 election,” the outlet added.
Whiting also has a history of donating to Democratic politicians.
“According to Open Secrets, he has donated thousands to Democrats over the years, including to extreme leftists such as Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama,” The Western Journal reported.
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 (@StevenCheung) September 22, 2023
Legal expert and constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley dismantled Smith over the latter’s latest attempt to at least partially gag Trump.
Since he filed federal charges against Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents and for his alleged role in ‘inciting’ the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, Smith has sought to prevent the former president from talking about — and criticizing — the indictments.
On Friday, Smith filed another request with a federal judge in Washington, D.C., seeking a “narrowly tailored” gag order to prevent Trump from making what Smith called “disparaging and inflammatory attacks on the citizens of this District, the Court, prosecutors, and prospective witnesses.”
But Smith isn’t trying to silence Trump alone. He also wrote in his filing, “A supplemental order that extends some of the prohibitions that apply to defense counsel to the defendant himself is particularly warranted.”
“Shortly after the indictment in this case was unsealed, the defendant’s lead counsel began a series of lengthy and detailed interviews in which he potentially tainted the jury pool by disseminating information and opinions about the case and a potential witness and described in detail legal defenses that he plans to mount, including defenses that may never be raised in court or that may be rejected by the Court before ever reaching the jury,” the filing said.
In a column published after Smith’s filing, Turley, a law school professor at George Washington University, wrote that there was a new addition to the late President Ronald Regan’s “nine most terrifying words in the English language.” (“I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.”)
“After Friday night, we can add nine more: ‘a narrowly tailored order that imposes modest, permissible restrictions,’” he wrote.
“The Smith motion is anything but ‘narrowly tailored.’ Indeed, short of a mobile ‘Get Smart’ Cone of Silence, it is chilling to think of what Smith considered the broader option,” Turley added, making a reference to a 1960s spy comedy starring Don Adams.
He continued:
Smith told District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., that Trump could “present a serious and substantial danger of prejudicing” his 2020 federal election interference case.
Smith compared Trump’s comments on the trial to the “disinformation” spread by Trump after the 2020 election — the subject of the indictment.
The motion states that Trump’s “recent extrajudicial statements are intended to undermine public confidence in an institution — the judicial system — and to undermine confidence in and intimidate individuals — the Court, the jury pool, witnesses, and prosecutors.”
“Ironically, Smith’s move will likely be seen as reinforcing Trump’s claim of intentional election interference by the Biden Administration,” Turley wrote.
The law professor said while he doesn’t view the situation similarly, he believes that “Smith is showing his signature lack of restraint in high-profile cases, a tendency that led to the unanimous overturning of his conviction of former Virginia Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell.”
He said that Smith is seeking to ban comments “regarding the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses” and “statements about any party, witness, attorney, court personnel, or potential jurors that are disparaging and inflammatory, or intimidating.”
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