The State of the United States: A Conversation with Jack Smith

The second Trump administration has disrupted longstanding norms of US power at home and abroad. In an era of constitutional hardball where the Executive Branch is asserting ever greater levels of authority, what is the future of US democracy? How might leaders, citizens, and people outside the US shape the course of events? And what can we learn from how other countries have handled moments of democratic challenges and crisis? The State of the United States is a series of bold conversations, bringing prominent US judges, attorneys, legal experts, and media figures into discussion about democracy and constitutionalism in the Trump Era. The events also highlights the work of the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism, which is devoted to advancing knowledge of democratic governance, the rule of law, and constitutional resilience.

Jack Smith is a US attorney who has served in the United States Department of Justice as an assistant US attorney, acting US attorney, and head of the department's Public Integrity Section. He was also the chief prosecutor at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, an international tribunal at The Hague tasked with investigating and prosecuting war crimes in the Kosovo War. He served as a Special Counsel for the Department of Justice from 2022 until 2025. In November 2022, attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Smith an independent special counsel, responsible for overseeing two preexisting Justice Department criminal investigations into Donald Trump, three days after Trump announced his 2024 presidential campaign: one regarding Trump's role in the January 6 US Capitol attack, and the other into alleged mishandling of government records, including classified documents.

Professor Andrew Weissmann is Professor of Practice at New York University. Professor Weissmann served as a lead prosecutor in Robert S. Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office (2017-19) and as Chief of the Fraud Section in the Department of Justice (2015-2019). From 2011 to 2013, Weissmann served as the General Counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He previously served as special counsel to then-Director Mueller in 2005, after which he was a partner at Jenner & Block. From 2002-2005, he served as the Deputy and then the Director of the Enron Task Force in Washington, D.C., where he supervised the prosecution of more than 30 individuals in connection with the company’s collapse.

Professor Weissmann is the co-host of the popular podcast Main Justice and is a frequent legal analyst for NBC/MSNBC. He serves on the board of Just Security and writes frequently for it, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. His memoir about the Special Counsel investigation, Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation , was a New York Times bestseller.

The Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism, based at the UCL Faculty of Laws, seeks to advance scholarly knowledge of democratic governance, the rule of law, and constitutionalism. As a research community with a global perspective, our key focus is understanding how to achieve constitutional resilience in electorally competitive political systems.

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