Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Connections to Lois Lerner and George Soros
John Luman “Jack” Smith, 54, is the Special Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice prosecuting Donald Trump in two separate cases.
Born on June 5, 1969, Smith grew up in Clay, New York, a small town outside Syracuse.
He attended Liverpool High School, where he played baseball and football, graduating in 1987. After high school, he went to the State University of New York at Oneonta. He graduated in 1991. He then attended Harvard Law School.
Jack Smith is married to Katy Chevigny. They have one daughter.
Shortly after graduating law school, Smith was hired as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He later worked in the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, rising to eventually become chief of criminal litigation.
In 2008, Smith moved to The Hague, Netherlands, and worked as an investigation coordinator in the International Criminal Court, before returning two years later to the U.S., moving to Washington, D.C. where he would lead the Justice Department’s public integrity unit.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Smith in November 2022 as special counsel to oversee two investigations into former President Trump.
The first case is about Trump’s alleged attempts to “overturn the 2020 election” and his alleged involvement with the Jan. 6 incident. The second case is about Trump’s alleged retention of classified documents at his home in Florida.
“This meeting was arranged at the direction of Public Integrity Section Chief Jack Smith.”
IRS targeting of conservative nonprofits started with a meeting arranged by Smith in 2010, according to testimony by his subordinate to Congress.
Richard Pilger told the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability that, as chief of the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, Smith reached out to Lois Lerner, who ran the tax-exempt organizations unit of the Internal Revenue Service, so they could coordinate efforts.
“The Justice Department convened a meeting with former IRS official Lois Lerner in October 2010 to discuss how the IRS could assist in the criminal enforcement of campaign-finance laws against politically active nonprofits. This meeting was arranged at the direction of Public Integrity Section Chief Jack Smith,” Pilger said.
“Jack Smith was looking for ways to prosecute the innocent Americans that Lois Lerner targeted during the IRS scandal,” said U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).
Wife is a left-wing filmmaker; mother in law received funding from George Soros
In 2011, Smith married Chevigny, a New York City native and prolific filmmaker who had previously married and divorced.
Chevigny is most notable for Deadline, a film she made about former Illinois Governor George Ryan’s blanket commutation of 167 death sentences in the state. Ryan, a Republican, would later go to prison on corruption charges.
A month after his indictment, Ryan traveled to the Sundance Film Festival to promote Chevigny’s film, telling reporters that “the death penalty system and the laws of this country need to be fixed.”
A Joe Biden donor, Chevigny also worked on films promoting Michelle Obama, and criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which held that the government couldn’t limit the free speech of U.S. citizens.
Chevigny’s mother, Bell Chevigny, (1936-2021) was a Wellesley College graduate who became a professor at Purchase College, SUNY. There, she once researched prison writers with the help of a grant from George Soros. The “Bell Chevigny Prize for Feminist Studies” was established in her name, upon her passing.
Katy Chevigny is a Hunter College H.S. and 1990 Yale graduate. After college, Chevigny moved to Chicago to work for the Vietnamese Association. She is fluent in Chinese.
Passed Over by Trump for a Promotion
After four years living together in Washington, D.C., Smith and Chevigny moved to Nashville in 2015.
Smith was working in the U.S. Department of Justice office in Nashville as First Assistant U.S. Attorney when Trump was elected president in 2016.
Three months into Trump’s term, in March 2017, his boss, David Rivera, was removed from office by then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Smith was appointed as acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, his temporary replacement.
Smith would last five months in the job.
“Though not looking to leave the department of Justice, Smith said he had been offered an incredible opportunity and after much consideration, he had decided to leave the DOJ,” he said in a press release in August 2017, announcing his departure from the DOJ.
“This was one of the most difficult professional decisions that I have ever been faced with,” the release quoted Smith as saying.
Smith joined Nashville-based HCA Healthcare Inc. as its vice president of litigation, the only private sector job of his career. But that only lasted eight months.
War Crimes at The Hague
Smith left Nashville in May 2018 for The Hague, accepting a four-year term as chief prosecutor for “The Kosovo Specialist Chambers” there, where he would investigate war crimes in the 1998-99 Kosovo War.
His first target, Salih Mustafa, a pro-Kosovo independence fighter, compared Smith’s court to that created by Nazi secret police.
“I am not guilty of any of the counts brought here before me by this Gestapo office,” Mustafa told judges, before his trial and eventual conviction.
As a prosecutor, Smith is known by colleagues for making charging decisions“as swiftly as possible.”
“Former colleagues said Mr. Smith’s most memorable attribute was a stripped-down management style that put a premium on gathering enough information to make a charging decision as swiftly as possible,” wrote Glenn Thrush in the New York Times.
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