By Steve Neavling
Former special counsel Jack Smith, who led investigations into Donald Trump, has broken his silence to speak out against the Trump administration’s purge of Justice Department employees.
In a new video released Wednesday by Justice Connection, a group that assists current and former department workers, Smith appears alongside other ex-officials criticizing the administration’s firing of prosecutors and agents linked to Trump-related cases.
“Justice Connection supported my team when they were unjustly fired,” Smith says in the video, which includes clips of the president and senior officials discussing plans to dismiss civil servants.
Smith, who resigned just before Trump’s return to office, has recently become more outspoken about what he calls politically motivated retaliation. In a separate interview this week, he said he was “very concerned” about efforts to “demonize these people for political ends when these are the very sort of people I think we should be celebrating,” New York Times reports.
Speaking last month at George Mason University, Smith said, “What I see happening at the Department of Justice today saddens me and angers me — selfless public servants fired for doing their job.”
The firings have continued. FBI Director Kash Patel last week dismissed two agents who worked on the Jan. 6 investigation into Trump’s role in the Capitol riot.
