Former Special Counsel Jack Smith showed up at the "Power to the People Fest" over the weekend wearing a Bruce Springsteen "No Kings" tour shirt. Photos shared online captured the man who spent years prosecuting Donald Trump mingling at a progressive music festival headlined by Springsteen, Macklemore, Dave Grohl, Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello, and Joan Baez.
The shirt read: "Bruce Springsteen & E Street Land of Hope and Dreams American Tour No Kings."
Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl apparently hit it off with the former prosecutor, dedicating a moment onstage to "my new friend Jack." Just a regular concertgoer, enjoying some tunes, making friends with rock stars. Nothing about that screams "I had a political agenda the whole time."
The festival itself was funded in part by George Soros. So to recap: the special counsel who told the country his Trump prosecution was a sober exercise in legal duty is now partying at a billionaire-backed progressive rally, wearing merch that calls the sitting president a king, and getting shoutouts from the stage. Impartial.
The timing is what makes this more than a wardrobe choice. On September 29, just days before Smith's festival outing, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the scope of his investigations. Journalist Catherine Herridge testified that the "big takeaway is that the investigations by Jack Smith were much broader and more sweeping" than the public had been told.
Herridge laid out what that meant in practice. Smith's team collected financial data — addresses, names, phone numbers, bank account numbers, routing numbers — on approximately 5,000 Americans who made political donations to the Republican Party. Not bundlers. Not mega-donors. People who gave five dollars, ten dollars, one dollar.
Senator Lee called it a "direct violation of the Fourth Amendment." That's not a rhetorical flourish from a cable news panel. That's a sitting U.S. senator describing what the evidence showed at a formal hearing. Smith's office vacuumed up the banking information of thousands of ordinary citizens whose only crime was donating to the wrong party.
The people defending Smith's conduct as routine prosecutorial practice are the same people who spent four years insisting the investigation was narrowly focused and legally airtight. The 5,000 donor records say otherwise. You don't pull bank routing numbers on small-dollar Republican donors because you're building a case about classified documents.
What Smith did after leaving office tells you what he was doing while in office. A prosecutor who believed his work was above politics would spend the post-investigation period keeping his head down, maybe teaching a law school seminar, projecting the kind of restraint that signals confidence in the record. That's the playbook for someone who thinks the facts speak for themselves.
The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches. Five thousand donor records, routing numbers included, gathered during an investigation into a single defendant. Senator Lee's characterization stands, and Jack Smith spent his weekend proving it wasn't strong enough.