The Right Has Some Zany New Accusations Against Jack Smith

Republicans have begun to push a wild new conspiracy about Jack Smith, trying to discredit the special counsel who has been investigating Donald Trump for the past year.

The latest bizarre claim that’s been percolating on the right contends that Smith participated in a multimillion-dollar extortion scheme in the late 2010s when he worked as the chief prosecutor for the special court in The Hague investigating war crimes committed during the Kosovo War.

Despite a lack of evidence to support this accusation, it has already begun to make its way into the Republican mainstream. Trump’s former national security advisor (and pardon recipient) Michael Flynn has tweeted multiple times about the conspiracy in an attempt to lend it a veneer of credibility.

This latest bit of rumormongering began to circulate in early December when a former DEA employee named John Moynihan filed what he called a “whistleblower complaint” against Smith. (Since Moynihan no longer works for the DEA, he’s not technically a department whistleblower anymore.)

Moynihan alleges that a blackmail ring set up in the special Kosovo court “extorted millions of dollars from wealthy individuals targeted for investigation and/or prosecution by the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office,” also referred to as the SPO. Smith worked as the SPO’s chief prosecutor from 2018 until 2022. Moynihan says he has witness testimony proving Smith was an “active participant” in the ring.

Moynihan’s primary witnesses are Kosovar businessman Halit Sahitaj and Kosovo-born journalist Milaim Zeka. Sahitaj was arrested in Spain in August for extortion and money laundering, while Zeka has been accused over the past decade of witness intimidation, money laundering, threatening a prosecutor, and wiretapping.

Both men say they were approached by a man claiming to be a U.S. intelligence official as part of the investigation into Kosovo war crimes. The man then pushed them to send money to a secret bank account, supposedly at Smith’s behest. Neither Sahitaj nor Zeka were able to confirm if the man was indeed an intelligence official, and they never had any face-to-face interaction with Smith.

But the cast of characters involved in backing Moynihan’s allegations don’t do much to lend them credibility. One of the first websites to report Moynihan’s complaint was Deep Capture, which was founded by former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. Byrne is an ardent 2020 election denier and Trump supporter who participated in a December 2020 White House meeting, during which Trump mulled how to overturn the election.

When news of Moynihan’s complaint began to break, Byrne tweeted, “I DID THAT!”

Moynihan’s lawyer is also representing John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of a Delaware computer shop who turned Hunter Biden’s laptop over to Rudy Giuliani. And Moynihan himself is no stranger to making wild claims of his own.

In 2018, he and an associate insisted they had 6,000 pages worth of evidence that the Clinton Foundation had engaged in financial crimes. The pair testified before the House Oversight Committee that the foundation was operating as an agent of a foreign government—but they refused to turn over a single page of proof to the committee.

Committee member Jody Hice, a Republican, accused Moynihan at the time of “using us for your own benefit.” Hice added it seemed like there was “a little game going on here.” It seems like Moynihan may be at it again.