Former Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith said in a capacity-crowd appearance at Dartmouth that the value of public service and public servants to the United States cannot be overestimated and that the rule of law is paramount.
“The goal of good prosecutors is to treat people equally under the law. The traditions of the department help you do that,” Smith said at the Sept. 17 event, which was co-sponsored by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and Dartmouth Dialogues.
“When I was a prosecutor in the Department of Justice, a key principle was process, not outcomes. Meaning you follow the good process, you follow the facts, and you follow the law. You can’t control the outcome.”
The Constitution Day Roger S. Aaron ’64 Lecture, the first in a series of public events at Dartmouth leading up to the midterm elections, was moderated by Brendan Nyhan, the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government and a co-director of Bright Line Watch, a group that monitors the status of American democracy, and John Pellettieri ’97, a former colleague of Smith’s at the DOJ. The event drew 215 students, faculty, staff, and other community members to Filene Auditorium, with another 175 watching a livestream.
As a longtime prosecutor who worked for several different administrations, Smith said that the expectations for and deportment of DOJ officials should not change from one administration to the next.
“Whether it was Republican or Democrat, the leadership wanted the department to be credible and wanted the department to be functional. The prosecutors that I looked up to and tried to emulate were prosecutors who believed in no fear, no favor,” Smith said.
Smith was appointed by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2022 to investigate whether President Donald Trump unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power after the 2020 election, as well as Trump’s retention of classified documents after he left office in early 2021. Smith obtained indictments against Trump but moved to dismiss the charges after Trump was re-elected in 2024 due to a long-standing DOJ policy that prevents sitting presidents from facing criminal prosecution.
Smith is limited in what he can discuss publicly about the cases. But one of the key goals of his public appearances after stepping down from the DOJ before President Trump returned to office in 2025, he said, is to rebut the stereotype of a “deep state” and to emphasize the honesty and character of those who choose a career in public service.
Protecting the rule of law
“One of the things that frankly angers me now is the sort of attack that we see on public servants. My experience in my career is that the rule of law and integrity are intertwined. They’re together. You cannot have a functioning rule of law without people with integrity to enforce it,” Smith said.
In his experience, Smith noted, the people he has worked with over a nearly-30-year-career have made tremendous sacrifices to labor in public service, including time spent away from family. “Working with people like that every day was as rewarding as the work itself was,” he said.
An important lesson emerging from the current atmosphere of public vitriol and threats aimed at judges and the court system, Smith said, is that “if you want to protect the rule of law, you need to protect the people who enforce the law. If they can’t do their jobs without being fired, if they have to come to work with a box, ready to be fired on any given day—no one should have to work under those conditions.”
Smith graduated from Harvard Law School and then worked in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, and then as a federal prosecutor in New York. He later worked for the Office of the Prosecutor in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. After returning to the U.S., he took on corruption cases for the DOJ. In 2018, he was appointed by the State Department to be a chief prosecutor at the ICC, where he prosecuted war crimes that had taken place in Kosovo.
After Nyhan asked about the current state of the Justice Department, Smith answered that the role of the DOJ during the second Trump presidency in going after the administration’s perceived enemies is nothing he had seen before in his career, with long-term implications for the American justice system.
“When you lose credibility because you engage in these retribution cases, you don’t lose it just in those cases. If the institution you work for is no longer credible with the courts and the juries, you’re not going to be effective with doing all the things that the Department of Justice does in keeping us safe,” Smith said.
Although Smith said he felt he had had a good run in his career, and it was time to retire from public service, “it turns out, you don’t stop serving once you turn in your government credentials. I believe all of us have a responsibility to our fellow citizens to do the right thing, to make sacrifices, to make the country better.”
In answer to an audience question about how he approached talking to Americans who may not share his views, Smith said that “if people are willing to meet you in a place of ‘all right, let me hear what your concern is; well, let me share mine,’ that usually goes pretty well.”
It is not unlike his experience of talking to uncooperative or potential witnesses in court, he said. Even if he came in with a certain set of assumptions, “once I started listening to them, it was different.”
‘Running towards the fire’
A student in the audience asked how the DOJ, and by implication the government as a whole, could begin to rebuild trust with Americans.
“Regaining trust is a lot harder than just establishing it in the first place, right?” Smith answered. It will be a challenging process, he said. But a good place to start would be to encourage the current generation of American lawyers and judges to act as mentors to the younger generations, Smith said.
Now, not later, is “the time to start having those discussions and thinking through those things. My general experience as a prosecutor, particularly as a corruption and war crimes prosecutor, is that abusive power happens when power is condensed in one place, whether it’s running the institution or in one person,” Smith said.
For students eyeing a career in public service, including in the DOJ or the FBI, Smith said, mentors can be found, with years of invaluable experience behind them and a pride in tradition and following the law.
“They’re working doing the right thing the right way under difficult circumstances. They need young people to continue going into public service so they can teach those traditions to them,” Smith said.
For Americans who may wonder what they can do to address what seem like overwhelming problems confronting the U.S., Smith advised starting with “one little thing,” whatever that may be. If enough people take up the responsibility of making government work better, America can solve its problems.
“We can reassert the rule of law in the United States, and the United States as a place that is a model for other nations. We can do that, but we can’t farm it out to other people. We have to look at ourselves and say, what can we do to make that happen?” Smith said.
If the history of the U.S. has demonstrated anything, it is that “the best and biggest steps forward, in terms of rule of law and in terms of the progress of our country, have been when things were tough and things were hard,” Smith said.
“It kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier. Just because there’s challenges right now, people should be running towards the fire, not away from it,” Smith concluded, to a standing ovation.
After the speech, Theodore Gray ’30, a first-year student from New Hampshire interested in law and government, said the discussion was insightful and “really interesting—definitely a warning going forward.”
All the events in the series are co-sponsored by Dartmouth Dialogues, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Office of the Associate Dean for the Social Sciences.
