Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice indicted President Trump, accused the Justice Department of having been “corrupted” by Trump loyalists he claimed were demolishing its credibility and seeking to undermine the rule of law.
Mr. Smith’s remarks, made last month in a private discussion at the Cosmos Club in Washington, represented his sharpest criticism of the department since leaving his post early last year. They came at a time when Mr. Trump is demanding Mr. Smith be prosecuted for his work as special counsel — an outcome Mr. Smith believes is likely, according to people familiar with his thinking.
“We have a Department of Justice today that targets people for criminal prosecution simply because the president doesn’t like them,” Mr. Smith said in the hourlong discussion on April 20, according to a video obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Smith, speaking in the deliberate cadence of a prosecutor delivering a closing argument, cited what he cast as the wholesale erosion of the department’s tradition of independence from the White House. “We have a department that fails to investigate cases because they might uncover facts that are inconvenient narratives the president would like to press,” he said.
“We have a department that fails to move on cases because they might uncover facts that are inconvenient to narratives the president would like to press,” added Mr. Smith, who was appointed in late 2022 to investigate Mr. Trump’s post-presidency retention of government documents and his push to overturn the 2020 election.
Asked to comment, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Emily Covington, said, “I would expect nothing less from Jack Smith.”
The New York Times obtained a video of the event — an hourlong session in front of 300 people that included an opening speech and a brief question period — that was sent to club members and attendees.
The video offers a rare glimpse of the typically tight-lipped prosecutor, who has confined his comments to congressional testimony and closed events in an effort to defend himself against attacks by the president and his allies.
Mr. Smith told the audience, which included former Justice Department officials, that he remained optimistic that the institution could be recommitted to its nonpartisan mission, even though it had “been corrupted over the last year” by Trump appointees he said were more eager to impress their boss than follow laws, rules and norms.
Mr. Smith said it had become “difficult to track” the number of times federal judges had accused Justice Department officials of dishonesty or lack of candor since Mr. Trump returned to office.
He expressed solidarity with department employees who had quit or been forced out during the Trump administration. Efforts to portray them as Democratic partisans, he suggested, were part of a larger push by Mr. Trump to undermine the criminal justice system for political gain.
“To erode the rule of law in our country, you need to attack these people, and that is what we have seen since January of 2025,” Mr. Smith said, adding, “This attack on public servants — it’s not a byproduct of the attack on the rule of law. It is a central component of it.”
He singled out for praise a handful of federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents in Minnesota, saying they did the right thing by refusing to investigate the family members of an unarmed woman killed in January by an immigration agent during a street protest.
The Justice Department under Attorney General Pam Bondi declined to investigate the agent for potential civil rights violations. Instead, Ms. Bondi and Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, ordered federal law enforcement officials to find links between the victim and left-wing domestic terrorist groups.
“There were facts that they wanted to push down and have nobody see because they would interfere with a story that they wanted to tell,” he said. “I’ve never been in a Department of Justice that would be willing to be complicit in something like that.”
Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed that Mr. Smith was motivated by personal and political animus, and have demanded his prosecution, even though they have never produced evidence that he did anything wrong.
“Hopefully the Attorney General is looking at what he’s done, including some of the crooked and corrupt witnesses that he was attempting to use in his case against me,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media earlier this year.
The decision of whether to prosecute Mr. Smith now rests with Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general who served as Mr. Trump’s lead defense lawyer in the cases brought by Mr. Smith.
But unlike others targeted by Mr. Trump, Mr. Smith still could inflict damage on the president by revealing unreleased evidence. He appears unfazed by the prospect of shifting from accuser to accused.
The White House was so concerned about Mr. Smith’s investigation into Mr. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida that they successfully blocked the release of a section of the special counsel’s final report that might have reminded the public of the evidence used to bolster the indictment.
And while Republicans publicly sought to spin as a victory testimony Mr. Smith gave to a congressional panel behind closed doors in February, they privately conceded that he handled himself well and posed a serious threat to Mr. Trump, given that he had a public forum to publicize his investigations.
For all his criticism of the department, Mr. Smith offered it high marks in communicating its actions and intentions more clearly than he did as special counsel. He acknowledged doing so was a necessary tactic in the social media age.
“I grew up as a prosecutor in sort of the Robert Mueller mode of prosecutor,” he told the audience at the Cosmos Club, referring to the former F.B.I. director and the first special counsel to investigate Mr. Trump. Mr. Mueller recently passed away at the age of 81.
“I speak in courtrooms,” Mr. Smith said. “I do not speak on the courthouse steps. I don’t do media.”
He added: “That limits a prosecutor and the department’s ability to explain what it’s doing. You know, if you’re competent and you do have integrity, and you do things independently. If you can’t get the public to know that, that’s really tough.”
