Special Counsel Jack Smith isn’t overseeing two DOJ cases against Donald Trump. He’s over seeing at least three.
When Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to be the closer who prosecutes Donald Trump, it was widely reported that Smith was overseeing two different Trump criminal probes: the classified documents scandal and the election overthrow scandal.
At the time we were left to wonder why Garland would only put Smith in charge of two of the DOJ’s Trump probes. After all, there were at least three known DOJ probes into Trump at the time, including one into the financing behind Trump’s social network.
Sure enough, CNN is now reporting that Smith has also taken over a year long DOJ probe into Trump’s misuse of campaign money. This isn’t particularly surprising, given that Trump has spent all this time pretending to be a serious 2024 candidate, while seemingly just pocketing the money instead of running anything close to a legitimate campaign.
CNN is specifically reporting that Jack Smith and the DOJ are investigating Trump’s Save America PAC, which is notable because earlier this week the Washington Post reported that this same PAC was paying the legal bills of the witnesses in the DOJ’s classified documents probe. Now it turns out this PAC has been under DOJ investigation for awhile.
The rest of this lengthy new CNN article mostly just alternates between quoting unnamed former Trump lawyers who are confident Trump won’t be charged, and quoting unnamed former Trump lawyers who fear Trump will be charged (these lawyers wouldn’t know either way and are just making guesses). But the one key detail in the article, about the DOJ’s financial probe into Trump, means that Jack Smith is overseeing at least three DOJ probes into Trump. Given that there are one or more additional DOJ Trump probes beyond the three that are now confirmed to be under Smith’s purview, it’s reasonable to ask 1) just how many DOJ Trump probes there are, and 2) whether it’s fair to presume that Smith is now in charge of all of them.
