Jack Smith wanted Donald Trump behind bars before voters ever got their say in 2024.
That much everybody knew.
What nobody knew was how far his people reached into Donald Trump’s family, and Alan Dershowitz went all the way back to Stalin to describe it.
A Lifelong Liberal Lawyer Hits His Breaking Point
Alan Dershowitz has spent most of his life in the Democrat camp. He’s defended clients nobody else would touch and taught law for decades.
So when the old professor blows a gasket over something a Democrat administration did, it’s worth paying attention.
Reports surfaced in early October 2026 that former President Joe Biden’s FBI tracked Melania Trump and Barron Trump as part of Smith’s investigation into President Trump’s handling of national security documents. Smith’s probe got rolling in May 2022, when Barron was 16 years old.
Sixteen. A teenager whose only offense was having the wrong last name.
But the family wasn’t the only target. According to the same reports, Smith covertly monitored the phone calls and emails of Susie Wiles in 2024, while she co-chaired President Trump’s campaign. Wiles now serves as White House Chief of Staff.
Think about that for a second. Federal investigators kept tabs on the woman running a rival presidential campaign in the middle of an election year.
Dershowitz sat down with Newsmax host Greta Van Susteren on October 7, 2026, and he let Merrick Garland have it.
He admitted he started out as a “big fan” of Garland’s appointment as Attorney General. That didn’t last long. In Dershowitz’s telling, the surveillance of Trump’s family and advisers did a big share of the damage.
He hammered Garland for signing off on the operation “without understanding the seriousness of intruding potentially on conversations” involving the person running the opposing campaign.
“It’s not what we do in this country, it’s not what we’re supposed to do, and this should be looked into,” Dershowitz said. “This is unacceptable in American politics and law.”
Dershowitz Reached for Stalin, and He Wasn’t Joking
But Dershowitz didn’t stop there. He walked through the only two explanations he could see, and neither one is comforting.
Option one: Smith and the FBI went after Trump because he was Trump. Dershowitz compared that scenario to “Stalin talking to Beria,” and he quoted the infamous line, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”
Beria ran Stalin’s secret police. Folks who lived through the Cold War don’t need the rest explained.
Option two scared him more.
“But what’s worse is: this is business as usual, that this happens all the time. That the FBI tracks people running for office,” Dershowitz said.
And honestly, it’s hard to pick the worse answer. A one-time political hit job is an outrage. A standing habit of watching candidates and their families means the whole system is rotting from the inside, and nobody bothered to mention it.
President Trump weighed in around the same time while taking questions from reporters at the White House. He lumped Smith and Garland into a “whole group of thugs” who “weaponized” the government against him and the people closest to him.
“These were bad people. These are bad sick people actually, very sick people. Deranged Jack Smith, he’s a sick guy. He lied before Congress. He lied all over the place. His whole life is a lie, and so many others that were just very bad,” Trump said.
He saved one more shot for Garland. “It’s a very bad group of people and they were being led by a man that didn’t lead,” Trump said.
Ted Cruz Lands a Punch, With Plenty of Baggage
Smith recently testified before Congress about his Trump probes, and US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) laid into him. Cruz called the investigations “disgraceful” and predicted history would remember them as the “most egregious abuse of power in the history of the Department of Justice.”
Strong words. And Cruz isn’t wrong about the abuse.
But Cruz makes a curious messenger. He was the Never Trump favorite in the 2016 primary and famously refused to endorse Trump from the convention stage that summer. He’s since broken with Trump on tariffs, and he looks a lot like the man donors nostalgic for the pre-Trump Republican Party are eyeing for 2028. That’s a neoconservative lane, whatever rhetoric he wraps it in on any given day.
As for Smith, the grilling didn’t seem to leave a mark. According to Mediaite, he turned up at an anti-Trump music festival a few days after his testimony wearing a “No Kings” shirt.
A prosecutor who swears he only followed the facts, strolling around an anti-Trump festival in protest gear. Readers can draw their own conclusions.
Jack Smith’s Fingerprints Are All Over the 2024 Campaign
None of this happened in a vacuum.
Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith in November 2022 to run both the classified documents investigation and the January 6 investigation. Smith then raced to bring constitutionally dubious charges against Trump and steered the January 6 case into Democrat-run Washington, DC, where a Republican defendant has about as much chance with a jury as a snowball in August. The whole point looked like dragging Trump through show trials and landing him in a cell before Election Day 2024.
It didn’t work. A federal judge in Florida tossed the documents case in July 2024 after ruling Smith’s appointment unconstitutional. That same month, the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision gutted much of the Washington, DC case.
Overreach is a familiar look for Smith. Back when he ran the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, his unit won a corruption conviction against a former Republican governor of Virginia. The Supreme Court threw it out unanimously in 2016.
And Smith’s operation never limited itself to Trump. Records Senate Republicans released in 2025 showed FBI agents working the case obtained phone records tied to Republican senators. The Wiles monitoring fits that same pattern. Smith treated the entire Republican Party like a crime scene.
Every few years, when Congress fights over reauthorizing FISA, the intelligence crowd promises these surveillance powers only go after terrorists and foreign spies. A teenage boy doesn’t fit either category. Neither does a campaign co-chair.
Maybe somebody inside the bureau had a narrow, legitimate reason for tracking Barron. Maybe. But if that reason exists, the officials who signed off on it owe the country a full explanation, on the record and under oath.
Dershowitz allowed that the investigations might have been technically “proper.” He still wants guardrails, arguing that “we ought to make sure we have things in step now that prevent it from happening [again].”
And that’s the part that ought to keep folks up at night. The tools don’t vanish when an administration packs up and leaves town. Garland’s Justice Department already showed its hand in 2021 when it pointed the FBI at parents raising a ruckus at school board meetings.
The next target might not be named Trump. It might be a pastor, a farmer, or a small-town Republican running for the state legislature.
Barron Trump was 16. Somebody in Washington, DC thought tracking him was a good idea, and the country still doesn’t know that person’s name.
Sources: Mediaite, “‘Dangerous!’ Alan Dershowitz Goes Ballistic Over Biden FBI’s Tracking of Melania, Barron Trump,” October 7, 2026; Newsmax interview with Greta Van Susteren via Greta Wire, October 7, 2026.
