What’s it like to be prosecuted by Jack Smith? By Manuel Roig-Franzia

www.washingtonpost.com

28 - 36 minutes

Updated October 3, 2023 at 2:27 p.m. EDT|Published October 3, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

In the federal cases against Donald Trump, all eyes are on the steely, enigmatic special prosecutor, who is known for psyching out adversaries. But he’s also lost some high-profile battles.

Updated October 3, 2023 at 2:27 p.m. EDT|Published October 3, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

(Laura Salafia/For The Washington Post)

Not so long ago, Jack Smith was just another Jack Smith, before the nation became acquainted with the bushy beard and penetrating if unrevealing gaze. Before he was named special counsel in charge of prosecuting the nation’s cases against former president Donald Trump.

Before pictures of Jack Smith leaving a Washington sandwich shop could cause a stir in the news cycle. Before we heard about the steely resolve and triathlete’s discipline — and very little else about the man.

Jack Smith, circa the early 2010s, was entrusted by the Department of Justice with its pursuit of wayward public officials. He had a habit of visiting prosecutors at the scattered U.S. attorney’s offices around the country. Often, they would tell him the same thing: Aw, they’d say, we don’t have a corruption problem here, Jack.

At a 2011 legal conference, in a rare public instance when he revealed something about what goes on in his head, Smith suggested that he was sure they were wrong. He would tell them so: You definitely have a corruption problem.

He was there to nudge. To prod. To “drum up business,” said one former colleague, who, like many interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal DOJ activities. He wanted those prosecutors out in the provinces — some of them creatures of the selfsame, favor-granting, sanctity-of-the-republic-abusing politics he disdains — to see what he saw from Washington.

Here was a man whose eyes fixed upon bright lines, who idealizes order in a disorderly universe.

The unrelenting aggressiveness that is his greatest strength is also Smith’s greatest weakness. Alongside his legal victories — and there have been many in three decades of prosecutorial activity large and small (he once nabbed a birthday party clown turned stickup artist dubbed the Lotto Bandit) — his willingness to push into areas that more risk-averse prosecutors would not have touched has undone him more than once. In some of his biggest cases — going after senators, a governor, a notorious cop killer — he reached for an outcome that he could not achieve.

He’s saddled, fairly or unfairly, with the stigma of not being able to win the big ones. Yet there’s a feeling among his confidants, some of whom reflected on him as long as their names were kept out, that what matters to him isn’t just the final outcome but also the message it sends to would-be wrongdoers, that someone is watching.

“Anytime you’re willing to bring tough cases and what you might think are important cases, you’re not always going to succeed,” said Lanny Breuer, a prominent white-collar defense attorney who was Smith’s boss at the Justice Department.

It is in a world of glaring clarity, self-assurance and high-wire prosecution work that Smith has positioned himself in his long career. A question that hovers over him is whether the moral clarity is always clear to everyone else. Does he sometimes see wrongdoing when it isn’t there? Or is it that the juries and judges who have disagreed with him simply failed to see what seemed so obvious to him?

What he sees in Trump is more than just a criminal who sought to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power by overturning the 2020 election results, and who endangered the nation by sloppily hoarding secret papers and other documents that belong in the National Archives or secure government facilities. He sees a man who knew full well that he was committing those crimes.

Though Smith isn’t saying and nothing is certain, it seems unlikely that he’ll be the one making those arguments directly to jurors. As he’s risen higher on the org charts, he’s tended to sit quietly and unobtrusively in courtrooms while prosecutors under his command did the talking — as he did when a scowling Trump was arraigned in Miami federal court in June on 37 counts of hiding secret documents at his Florida home. (Smith’s criminal prosecution of Trump, which could lead to prison time if he wins a conviction, is unrelated to the civil trial about the former president’s business practices that opened Monday in New York.)

Still, it was inevitable that the federal cases (both the Washington and Florida versions) would morph for the public into Smith v. Trump, one of the more consequential legal contests in the 247-year history of the American democratic experiment. At its core, it’s about one man’s interpretations of the other man’s intent. And intent is a concept Smith has internalized; he has called it his “battleground.” (Smith declined interview requests for this story.)

On that field of combat, Smith is faced with an adversary whose mastery of shaping public opinion and skewering opponents might be unrivaled. This caustic joker with messianic political appeal has labeled Smith a “rabid wolf,” “deranged,” a “psycho.”

    At its core, it’s about one man’s interpretations of the other man’s intent. And intent is a concept Smith has internalized.

What has been forgotten to time is that Smith once faced in court a real Joker, a real Messiah and a real Psycho. The records of that case, and how it played out, are all there in a riot of banker’s boxes at the federal court in Brooklyn that — irony alert — were borrowed by a federal official from the National Archives many years ago yet, as happens with some of the millions of federal documents, were still floating out there unreturned, where they were found by The Washington Post.

There are more than 250 attorneys in America named John or Jack Smith, according to the Martindale-Hubbell database. Trump, the former president who loves to put his name on everything, has tried to belittle the special counsel’s name as so commonplace it sounds made up.

Smith, who is 54, grew up in Clay, N.Y., a sturdy, middle-class community just north of Syracuse, where, even now, the average home costs about $150,000, according to the city’s website. His father worked as a commercial property air-conditioning systems draftsman, and his mother did not work outside the home for most of Jack’s early years, though she also has been employed sometimes at a data-processing center. The Smith family home sold for $58,000 less than a decade after Jack graduated from nearby Liverpool High School in 1987.

Smith would tell an Associated Press reporter in a rare 2010 interview that he considered being a prosecutor a way to serve people like his parents and uphold the values they instilled: “They pay their taxes, follow the rules and they expect their public officials to do the same.”

This John Smith went by Jack from an early age. In a photo from the Hiawathan yearbook, he sports the modest, neatly pruned mullet seen on just about any teenage boy in the 1980s — one of five Smiths in his graduating class, and apparently no standout.

He made the varsity football and baseball teams but played little, said George Mangicaro, his football coach. The onetime benchwarmer, who friends say still isn’t a natural athlete, just tries harder. He has gone on to become famously obsessive about physical activity. Smith has said that he completed his 100th triathlon in 2017 and competed in 13 triathlons in a single year, winning his age group in six. He rises early, before his wife and daughter have stirred, to swim or go on exhaustive pre-workday bike rides.

“It sets my head right for the day to come,” he said in a 2018 interview for a swim team blog.

Pain has been a frequent companion. In the 2000s, he competed in a triathlon 10 weeks after getting hit by a truck and fracturing his pelvis. The first time America was introduced to Jack Smith in a big way, when Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed him special counsel for the Trump investigations last November, he was recovering from knee surgery following a cycling accident.

The football coach remembers him being an average student in high school. Smith went on to the State University of New York at Oneonta, then to Harvard Law School, and Mangicaro wonders whether in some ways they failed him at Liverpool: “When I look at his academics, I think we didn’t challenge him enough.”

Smith might have followed the well-worn path from Harvard to a lucrative law-firm job, but he took the grittier route, signing on in the mid-1990s with the Manhattan district attorney’s office under the legendary Robert Morgenthau, at a time when the city’s courts teemed with crack cocaine and murder cases.

“He had a reputation as a fearless trial machine — a guy who tried case after case after case,” said Justin Shur, a former prosecutor in the same DA’s office who later worked as Smith’s deputy in DOJ’s public integrity section. Smith once insisted on picking jurors in one case he was handling while a jury in another case he’d prosecuted was still deliberating, Shur recalled.

In court, Smith spoke plainly and sensibly, said Alan Vinegrad, the former U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York who was Smith’s boss after he left the Manhattan DA’s office to become a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn. “He really knows how to talk to jurors.”

Friends and rivals use similar terms to describe him: steady, hard-working. Tireless. Dogged. Intense. Smart, yes. Missing are two clichés of the Washington interview, brilliant and genius, two things Smith has never claimed to be.

“I don’t think I was very talented,” Smith once told an AP reporter, describing his work as a prosecutor. “But [if] you field a lot of groundballs, you’re a good shortstop.”

    “He had a reputation as a fearless trial machine — a guy who tried case after case after case.”

    — Justin Shur

Working in the pressure cooker of Morgenthau’s office taught Smith a lesson that has echoes in his efforts to convict Trump: He developed a skill for spotting the telling detail that would pop with regular folk — that one thing that makes you go: “Wow. That’s not normal.” That knack shows up in the indictment of Trump for allegedly hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida club he also uses as a residence.

The intricacies of our nation’s rules about classified documents central to that case might make a person’s head spin. But it’s impossible to unsee photos included in the indictment of boxes haphazardly stacked in a bathroom that features a chandelier — not your typical American’s bathroom fixture. Then there’s the tableau in the indictment of a Trump associate tramping through bushes at Mar-a-Lago to allegedly discuss with another associate Trump’s directive to hide evidence by erasing security tapes — straight out of some campy crime-procedural spoof.

“That’s the DA’s office experience,” said Todd Harrison, who worked with Smith at the Manhattan DA’s office and later at the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn. “You learn how to put a case together and to make it interesting.”

In the late 1990s, a vicious gang rampaged through Long Island and the Bronx. They were charged with stealing $1 million from a jewelry store, ripping off drug dealers, kidnapping people, beating their enemies until they were nearly dead. They used code names to evade the authorities and, in some instances, to conceal their identities from one another.

Three of them went by the names Messiah, Psycho and Joker. When Joker was on the run, he wore women’s clothing to throw off the police. They were clever about evading justice.

Smith, who’d left the DA’s office for a post as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, needed someone to crack to make a case against them. And to do that, he needed to get into someone’s head — to figure out how to get that person to talk. That person was a dirty cop named Anthony Trotman, who’d joined the gang and was in a position to describe its inner workings.

“Jack was very patient with Trotman,” said Harrison, who worked the case with Smith. “He just talked to him from the beginning about why Trotman had become a police officer originally.”

They talked about Trotman’s days at the police academy. About how he’d once set out to help people.

“He convinced Trotman that that mind-set that he’d originally had was the correct one to have for your career and as an anchor for your whole life,” Harrison said. “He was able to appeal to Trotman’s remaining instincts to do the right thing.”

When the jewelry heist case went to trial, Trotman, who’d cut a deal in expectation of a lesser (but probably still lengthy) sentence, turned out to be a stellar witness, breaking down in tears while testifying. Smith was the one guiding him through the details for the jury.

The public almost never hears Smith speak now. But in hundreds of pages of transcripts from the jewelry-heist trial and other cases, Smith’s sense of moral indignation is noticeable, a way of looking at the world that former colleagues say he has maintained to this day. To them, it seems obvious that this same indignation undergirds his pursuit of Trump.

“Jack is a very moral guy,” Harrison said.

Smith often told juries that defendants were not just criminals, but also “bad people.” They were “not nice.” One defendant, Smith told jurors, “had a choice to live in a good way or a bad way, and he chose bad.” He was appealing to jurors to not only look at the facts, but also to look at these men as he did and see terminally flawed human beings.

Homespun expressions of disapproval for the men he prosecuted appear over and over in Smith’s casework. He’s irked not just that the jewelry-store robbers made off with $1 million but also that they robbed the same store twice, confident that they were “conviction proof.” Addressing jurors, he shared his distaste for what he imagined these thugs saying to themselves: “I’m a creator of unsolved crimes.”

Mitchell Golub, an attorney who represented one of the defendants, said in an interview that he tried to chart a path around Smith’s onslaught of accusation. Golub couldn’t find the way.

“He anticipated everything,” said Golub, now retired. “He was in control of himself.”

And that made people crazy.

Golub sees a similar technique at play now, as Trump endlessly and often contradictorily talks about Smith’s cases against him, describing them as a personal attack.

In those formative years, the defendant Smith perhaps rattled most was named Rasene Myton, a gang member known as “Fox,” who, unlike Trotman, refused to break.

    He was appealing to jurors to not only look at the facts, but also to look at these men as he did and see terminally flawed human beings.

Smith and his colleagues won a slew of convictions at trials over several years, benefiting enormously from several gang members who took plea bargains in return for their testimony. After Myton was convicted in 2001 on several counts related to the robberies, he sent a letter to his attorney complaining that Smith had a “personal vendetta” against him when prosecutors prepared to bring additional charges. Myton fulminated that Smith was engaged in a “form of vindictiveness.”

“Sometimes, Jack, as a tactic, would purposely try to get under people’s skins to try and get them to make a mistake or to say something when you’re interrogating them or during the course of the case to see if you can throw them off their guard a little bit,” Harrison said. “Jack’s smart about psychological warfare.”

Other times, he’d intimidate potential cooperating witnesses. Shur, his colleague at DOJ, can remember a detective pulling him aside while Smith was leaning on a man to plead guilty and become a prosecution witness.

“That guy’s afraid of Jack,” the agent told Shur.

Smith displayed a kind of energy and confidence that could be infectious but was occasionally unrealistic. Moe Fodeman, who prosecuted cases with Smith in Brooklyn, remembers walking with Smith to meet with a possible witness. Smith kept telling him the man would flip within three minutes. They opened the door to find a man who’d had the phrase “All rats must die” tattooed on his face.

Smith quickly left the room.

“This is going to be harder than I thought,” he told Fodeman.

The tattooed man held firm and refused to testify.

“It doesn’t always work out,” Fodeman said in an interview. “But Jack thinks it will.”

Smith was gaining a reputation as a young man on the rise in the Brooklyn office. Vinegrad tapped him while assembling a team for a case that was making national headlines: the prosecution of Charles Schwarz, a White police officer accused of holding down a Black immigrant named Abner Louima in 1997 while another officer sodomized him with a broken broomstick.

“I could have chosen anyone,” said Vinegrad, who was the lead prosecutor on the case. He asked Smith to deliver closing arguments. The jury convicted Schwarz of perjury in 2002 but was deadlocked on civil rights charges and a separate perjury count. It wasn’t all they’d hoped for, but the prosecutors considered it a win. Schwarz was going to prison.

Smith’s aggressiveness sometimes cost him. In 2007, he botched the sentencing of Ronell Wilson, a Staten Island man who’d executed two undercover police detectives. Wilson didn’t testify but read a brief statement expressing remorse after his conviction in hopes of getting some sympathy when he was sentenced.

This time it was Smith who got rattled. He went too far while he was trying to persuade the jury to sentence Wilson to die by lethal injection. He told jurors that Wilson was trying to have it both ways: refusing to testify at trial about the facts of the case, then playing to the jury’s sympathy by expressing remorse afterward.

“That is a manipulative criminal saying what he has to, saying what he knows you want to hear when it’s in his interest to say it,” Smith said.

An appeals court overturned the death penalty, saying Smith had violated Wilson’s constitutional rights by planting the idea in jurors’ heads that there was something wrong about being remorseful after refusing to testify, a right granted to any defendant.

“He was pushing the envelope a little on what the law allows you to say,” Harrison said. “And you could clearly argue he was a little overly aggressive in that sequence. He was disappointed and frustrated with the decision. But he’s pretty good at moving on.”

By 2010, the year Wilson’s death sentence was overturned, Smith had taken charge of a team at the Department of Justice, the public integrity section, that was struggling to overcome a tarnished reputation. The year before, it had bungled the prosecution of Ted Stevens, a long-serving Republican senator from Alaska who lost a reelection bid days after being convicted in a corruption case. Revelations of prosecutorial misconduct tainted the conviction so thoroughly that the Justice Department was forced to ask a judge to void the conviction.

The public integrity section then came under criticism for not going after members of Congress. In rapid succession, Smith dropped separate investigations of a Republican U.S. senator from Nevada, Republican House members from California, Texas and Alaska, and a Democratic House member from West Virginia.

Smith’s boss at the time, Lanny Breuer, who had supported the decisions to drop the investigations in hopes of freeing up resources for new inquiries, felt they needed to swing into damage-control mode.

He asked Smith, who’d rejoined DOJ a few months earlier following a two-year stint as a war-crimes investigator at the International Criminal Court, to talk to the media. If the roles had been reversed — if Smith had been his boss — Breuer thinks Smith probably would have endured the public pressure in silence.

But Smith did what his boss asked, explaining publicly that they’d made the decisions after looking at evidence that hadn’t showed up in news accounts of the probes. “If I were the sort of person who could be cowed,” he told the New York Times, “I would find another line of work.”

In the years to come, two prevailing reads on Smith emerged: One, that he was “gun-shy” because he dropped potentially controversial investigations of well-known public officials, would yield to a polar-opposite narrative that he was overly aggressive, incompetent or both. The competing takes were exaggerations, but such narratives seldom lend themselves to nuance. Just as U.S. presidents get too much blame for bad economies and too much credit for good economies, the Justice Department’s public integrity chiefs tend to get too much credit for convictions and too much blame for courthouse setbacks.

But what’s certain is that Smith wanted to rev up the metabolism of both the DOJ section he headed and the federal investigators who built cases at ground level around the country. Shur and Smith went on a national “roadshow” to let FBI agents know they could pitch potential cases directly to DOJ’s integrity section, rather than filtering through local federal prosecutors.

Three big cases involving politicians that flowed through Smith’s public integrity shop imploded. One centered on a widely panned decision to try out a moonshot legal theory that former U.S. senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) somehow violated campaign finance laws by funneling roughly $1 million to his mistress to hide their extramarital affair while he was running for president in 2008. It was the sort of case that many prosecutors would have passed on, reasoning there was little chance of a conviction. Not Smith. He went for it.

One of the prosecutors in the Edwards trial was David Harbach, a longtime close partner of Smith’s who now works with him in the special counsel’s office and who represented the government during Trump’s June arraignment in the classified documents case.

The jury acquitted Edwards on one count and couldn’t reach a verdict on five. Breuer said he decided not to retry the case, and Smith didn’t fight him on the decision.

“I didn’t know if he questioned that decision — to this day, I don’t know if he does,” Breuer said. “He took it as a professional without self-recrimination or any recriminations of his team.”

Smith’s tenure was further clouded by the collapse of the case against Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who was investigated while Smith headed DOJ’s public integrity section but tried after he left the post. Prosecutors eventually had to drop charges against Menendez in 2018 after a jury couldn’t reach a verdict on accusations that he’d used his power to do political favors for his pal and Caribbean getaway host, a wealthy South Florida eye doctor. (Menendez was indicted last month by federal prosecutors in New York in a case unrelated to Smith’s investigations of Trump.)

A third blow to Smith’s reputation came in 2016, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 2014 conviction of Bob McDonnell, the Republican former governor of Virginia, for accepting expensive gifts from a businessman while in office. (Smith wasn’t intimately involved in developing the case but attended the trial and participated in strategy sessions.)

Rival prosecutors aren’t inclined to be gentle when their office mates screw up. The trio of setbacks prompted one former colleague, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to snark freely, to dub Smith’s team, “The Boy Scout Troop That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” At other times, the office vibe was more chummy. Among those who also held a high-ranking position in DOJ’s criminal division at the same time as Smith was James Trusty, who would later serve as Trump’s attorney during the special counsel’s classified documents investigation. (Trusty resigned as Trump’s attorney after the former president was indicted in the documents case.)

Breuer can remember how Smith — who allegedly has a sense of humor, though there is little publicly available evidence of it — and Trusty would good-naturedly tease each other at meetings.

What often gets lost when assessing Smith’s five-year stint running public integrity for DOJ is that those high-profile cases that went wrong make up only a small fraction of the cases that came through his office. Less attention was garnered by victories such as the 2011 bribery and extortion conviction of Phil Hamilton, a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates, and the corruption conviction that same year of Kevin Ring, who was a figure in the scandal involving disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Annual reports to Congress show the workmanlike grind of convicting Border Patrol agents who illegally smuggled migrants into the United States, dirty cops in Puerto Rico, judges on the take, corrupt state legislators and larcenous lobbyists. Smith’s supporters will argue that those bread-and-butter cases have a real effect on deterring crime across the country, but most don’t generate headlines.

Smith did get a congressman, though. Rick Renzi, a Republican from Arizona, was convicted under Smith’s watch of extortion, bribery, insurance fraud, money laundering and racketeering. Renzi was no John Edwards. But it was a win.

Renzi served nearly two years in prison, getting out in 2017. Four years later, on Jan. 20, 2021, Renzi was pardoned by Trump on his last day in office.

The same day Trump was pardoning Renzi, boxes of documents were being removed from the White House at the president’s behest to be sent to Mar-a-Lago.

No one knew it at the time, but the stage had just been set for the showdown between Jack Smith and Donald Trump.

In the life and times of Jack Smith as a righter of wrongs, there is one detour, the briefness of which says much about Jack Smith.

It happened after he’d left Washington in 2015 for Nashville, where he worked lower to the ground, initially as the second-in-command, then as the acting head of the U.S. attorney’s office there. He’d put in five years running public integrity operations and now 2½ as a prosecutor in Tennessee.

If he’d been anyone else, no one would have been surprised when he announced in 2017 that he was leaving government service after more than two decades for a corporate job as the Hospital Corporation of America’s head of litigation. Fodeman, his former colleague, heard the news and thought to himself: “He’s never going to last at this.” The Jack Smith he knew seemed like a prosecution lifer.

Smith decided to leave the corporate job just eight months later. “He wasn’t a huge fan of being in private practice,” Harrison said. “He missed being a prosecutor.”

Smith then became the specialist prosecutor investigating Kosovo war crimes at The Hague. “I know this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” Harrison recalls Smith telling him. The interminably long slog of prosecuting war crimes is markedly different from the pace Smith was used to. But he hadn’t forgotten how to move fast — an instinct that placed Smith on a collision course with Trump in the last summer of his presidency.

Trump had been scheduled to host Kosovo’s president, Hashim Thaci, at a White House summit. While Thaci was on his way to Washington, Smith took the unusual step of publicly unveiling an indictment of Thaci on war crimes charges dating back to his time as a commander in the Kosovo Liberation Army.

When news broke, Thaci halted his trip to Washington en route. At the time, Smith said the indictment — which normally would have been kept under seal for months — had to be released, because Thaci was trying to evade justice by secretly working to overturn the law that created the Kosovo war crimes prosecution office.

Smith might have actually done Trump a favor — saving him from a photo op with an accused war criminal. But Trump has been trying to paint the episode as evidence that Smith has always been out to bedevil him, writing on Truth Social earlier this year that Smith sought to prosecute Thaci because he was a “Trump positive person.”

At The Hague, Smith wore the high-collared plum-and-black robe of the prosecutor. When he was appointed special counsel in November, those images of him in the robe were everywhere, beginning the construction of a Jack Smith mystique: stern, unsmiling, staring straight at the camera, an untamed cowlick and a scraggly beard gone salt-and-pepper. Bags under his eyes. Weary and world-weary. “I don’t know who told him to grow that beard,” said Breuer, his former boss. “He looks so severe.”

One TV reporter remarked that Smith looked like something out of Hogwarts, the school of witchcraft and wizardry in the Harry Potter series. She told her audience that she’d requested an official government photo from the special counsel’s office. The request was denied.

“He’s like a Zen master,” Breuer said. “He works the media by not working the media.”

Being unknowable has only stoked the desire to know him. Fragments come to light, but with little context or explanation in the invasive nature of history-making fame. The public learns that his wife, Katy Chevigny, co-produced the hagiographic, autobiographical Michelle Obama documentary “Becoming.” Also that Chevigny — whose work as a producer includes 2020’s “Dick Johnson Is Dead” and the 2007 voting rights documentary “Election Day” — donated $1,000 to President Biden’s campaign to unseat Trump in 2020. Chevigny also made a small contribution in 2008 to Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan who made headlines in 2019 after being elected to Congress when she used a profanity to describe Trump and vowed to impeach him. The sale of a home the couple owned in Tennessee also became tabloid news. (Chevigny, who married Smith in 2011, did not respond to an interview request.) Trump has brought unwelcome attention to Smith’s family by mentioning them in a social media post that some commentators found obliquely — or not so obliquely — threatening.

A Jack Smith sighting is now cause for a breaking news banner on cable news. On that morning in July when Trump revealed he’d received a target letter in Smith’s investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, CNN touted “exclusive” footage of the special counsel leaving a Subway sandwich shop. John King, the veteran political reporter, speculated that Smith was sending Trump a message that: “I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.” Mockery ensued.

Let’s run the footage back one more time: There Smith emerges at the door. There he is walking unhurriedly, swinging a sandwich bag. There he is stepping through the foliage in the sidewalk planter box as security guards scan for danger.

A door flings open to the back seat of one of those Important Men of Washington black SUVs. Jack Smith steps inside. He says absolutely nothing.

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

correction

A previous version of this article gave the incorrect nickname of Rasene Myton. The article has been corrected.