The Republican candidate for president of the USA, Donald Trump, has said that he will fire the special prosecutor, Jack Smith, "within two seconds", the moment he takes the post of president.
As AP reports, he declared on Thursday that this will be among the first decisions as president of the United States of America, while he described the special prosecutor as a "despicable" person.
Smith has accused Trump of his efforts to subvert the 2020 election process and mishandling forged documents. However, the prosecutor Jack Smith, who now operates only in the USA, once held the post of chief prosecutor of the Office of the Specialized Prosecutor (ZPS) in The Hague, where former president Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Jakup Krasniqi and Rexhep Selimi are being tried.
In November 2022, Smith left his post at The Hague to return to the United States to investigate Trump.
He is focused on investigating classified documents found in Trump's home and the former president's role in the attack on the Capitol.
The former American emissary for the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue, Richard Grenell, has also criticized Smith. He had stated that the indictment against the former president Hashim Thaçi from the Specialized Chambers was preceded by negotiations to reach the "final agreement that also included the undoing of the Special Court".
"A group of prosecutors could not find evidence against Thaci, and the former prosecutor said there was nothing in it, closed the file and ran away. The Hague continued to spend US dollars and Jack Smith spent years investigating war crimes," Grenell said of Smith in May 2024.
But, Smith has stated that the charges are not against the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), not even against Kosovo, but against individuals.
"The indictment is only about the individual criminal responsibility of the accused. In the case of Thaçi and others, they are Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi. However, when accusations of Joint Criminal Enterprises (NKP) are presented as a form of criminal liability, it is a legal standard that several other identifiable main actors are also mentioned in the indictment", he had told TIME exclusively in 2021.