Jack Smith was spotted in the crowd at the Power to the People Fest at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, on Saturday, October 3 — wearing a Bruce Springsteen "Land of Hope and Dreams" tour shirt that says "No Kings," beer in hand.
Attendees filmed him, and Just the News, the Washington Times, and the New York Post all ran the photos. President Trump reposted the story on Truth Social and wrote: "Deranged Jack Smith is a Crooked Prosecutor!"
It was not a solo Springsteen show. Tom Morello organized the event as a get-out-the-vote festival a month before the midterms. Springsteen was on the bill and played "Streets of Minneapolis," his anti-ICE song.
The timing is what makes it sting. Four days earlier, on September 29, Smith sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and said, "I am not a politician and I have no partisan loyalty." That line is in the hearing transcript. Then he showed up at a partisan GOTV festival in a "No Kings" shirt.
The White House didn't let it slide. On Monday, communications director Steven Cheung answered on X. The New York Post quotes him calling Smith "a scumbag who was the partisan attack rat for Democrats who weaponized the justice system against President Trump for political purposes." The Instagram post kept it shorter: "partisan attack rat."
For the administration and its supporters, this is the mask slipping. They've argued for years that Smith's prosecutions of Trump were never the neutral, above-politics work he claimed — and now, days after swearing under oath that he has no partisan loyalty, he's on video at a Democratic get-out-the-vote rally in protest merch. The contrast does their arguing for them.
The other side gets its caveats in. Smith has not confirmed the photos himself — the identification rests on the face match and attendee video the outlets used. Dave Grohl dedicated "My Hero" to "my new friend Jack" without ever saying the last name. And Smith's defenders will note that attending a concert isn't a crime, and that a former prosecutor is allowed to have personal politics.
But the hearing transcript doesn't grade on a curve. "I am not a politician and I have no partisan loyalty" — four days later, "No Kings" shirt, beer in hand, at a midterm GOTV festival. The photos are the rebuttal.