Who is Special Counsel Jack Smith and why is he prosecuting Donald Trump?

Special Counsel Jack Smith is famous for pursuing high-profile cases against US officials and is currently overseeing such matters investigating two different cases in which former US President Donald Trump has been indicted for the third time Tuesday.

The 54-year-old prosecutor was designated to take over Donald Trump's investigations last November.

Smith has successfully secured grand jury's two indictments against the former US president Trump.

The latest indictment Tuesday charged 77-year-old Trump with crimes including conspiracy and witness tampering for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democratic now-President Joe Biden. The former president falsely claim that the results were "fraud".

Jack Smith after securing indictment said: "It was fueled by lies. Lies by the defendant, targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the US government: a nation's process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election."

Smith is a Harvard Law School graduate who is not registered with any political party. He started as a prosecutor in 1994 at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office under Robert Morgenthau, who was best known for prosecuting mobsters.

"There was just a real emphasis, from Morgenthau on down, on not just going after convictions," said Todd Harrison, an attorney at the firm McDermott Will & Emery who worked with Smith in Morgenthau's office and later as a federal prosecutor.

"We were praised if we investigated something and demonstrated that the target of the investigation was innocent," Harrison added.

In 1999, Smith started working at the US Attorney's Office in Brooklyn.

Smith was involved in the prosecution of Charles Schwarz, one of several former New York City police officers who were implicated in a high-profile police brutality case involving Abner Louima, a jailed Black inmate who had been assaulted by police with a broomstick.

Smith also won a murder conviction against Ronell Wilson, a drug gang leader who murdered two undercover New York City police officers, though a federal appeals court vacated the death penalty verdict.

In 2008, Smith left to supervise war crime prosecutions at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Hague. He returned to the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2010 to head its Public Integrity Section until 2015.

More recently, Smith returned to war crimes cases in The Hague, winning the conviction of Salih Mustafa, a former Kosovo Liberation Army commander who ran a prison where torture took place during the 1998-99 independence conflict with Serbia.

His former colleagues said that when Smith is not busy competing in Ironman swim-cycle-run triathlon races, he is a dogged investigator who is open-minded and unafraid to pursue the truth.

He was described as just as tenacious in seeking to have criminal charges dropped for the innocent as he is to convict the guilty.

"If the case is prosecutable, he will do it," said Mark Lesko, an attorney at the firm Greenberg Traurig LLP who worked with Smith when both were prosecutors at the US Attorney's Office in New York. "He is fearless."

Indictments of Donald Trump and his criticism

It is followed by Trump’s earlier indictment for the alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left Oval Office in 2020.

In March, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged the Republican presidential candidate for 2024 with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records involving hush money paid to an adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential polls.

These cases are unlike any other that Smith has brought because of who is being charged.

Donald Trump was the US president from 2017 to 2021 and is now bidding for the White House once again, leading a crowded field of candidates.

Trump has proclaimed his innocence and repeatedly denied all the charges calling it a "witch hunt” against him.

While his interview with Fox News on July 19, Trump said that the Department of Justice "has become a weapon for Democrats," by earlier calling it the Department of Injustice.

He also criticised Jack Smith calling him a "deranged prosecutor".

"Why did they wait so long? Because they wanted to put it right in the middle of my campaign. Prosecutorial Misconduct!" Trump said on Truth Social.

Trump's own attorney Evan Corcoran came forward as a key witness in the classified documents probe.

Corcoran was forced to testify before a grand jury in March after a federal judge ruled that his conversations with Trump were not shielded by a legal doctrine called attorney-client privilege — protecting the confidentiality of certain communications between lawyers and their clients — if Trump's comments were made in furtherance of a crime.