Jack Smith, the special prosecutor pressing a criminal case against former President Trump, has incurred over $9 million in costs since being handed the assignment last year. Smith tallied $5.4 million in personnel, rent and other expenses on his own budget and prompted $3.8 million in spending by other Justice Department agencies in four months after he was tapped by Attorney General Merrick Garland last November to lead the classified documents probe as well investigations related to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, according to data released by the Justice Department, reports Politico. Those figures may dramatically underestimate Smith’s spending because they account for activities only through March, excluding the period leading up to Trump’s unprecedented indictment in June as well as a significant escalation of the election-related probe. Smith impaneled a second grand jury in Florida before issuing the charges against Trump.
The report highlights the unusual nature of Smith’s investigations. Of the $3.8 million in off-budget expenses, $1.93 million was spending by the U.S. Marshals Service. The agency provides a security detail for the special prosecutor, who has been seen flanked by marshals as he commutes to and from his Washington , D.C., office. The probes Smith is overseeing were well under way by the time he took over. He has largely maintained the existing staffing, although he added some prosecutors. The new report doesn’t indicate how much the Justice Department spent on related investigations in the months before Smith, a former head of DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, left his job as a war-crimes prosecutor in Europe and take over the Trump probes. A special counsel appointed in January to look into President Biden’s handling of classified documents discovered in his Delaware home spent $615,000 through March and led other parts of DOJ to incur about $572,000 in expenses. A third special counsel, John Durham, spent $1.1 million in the six months preceding March 31 as he wrapped up his report on the FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia probe that loomed over Trump’s administration. Special counsel Robert Mueller, named in 2017 to investigate allegations of Russian influence on the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, spent about $31.45 million.