The White House tore into former special counsel Jack Smith after weekend photos showed him in a “No Kings” shirt at a Maryland Springsteen festival, and officials say the episode fits a partisan pattern.
White House communications director Steven Cheung unloaded Monday on the ex-prosecutor after images and video placed him at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., wearing a “No Kings” T-shirt while heading to his seat with a beer in hand.
The appearance came days after Smith told senators he is “not a politician” and has “no partisan loyalty,” a claim the White House now treats as empty after the concert photos spread online.
Smith, 57, was captured in a Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band shirt under the “No Kings” message at Saturday’s “Power to the People” show, the New York Post reported.
Cheung did not speak evasively about the man who brought two criminal cases against President Trump before the 2024 election.
"Jack Smith is a scumbag who was the partisan attack rat for Democrats who weaponized the justice system against President Trump for political purposes,"
he wrote on X, adding a warning aimed well beyond one concert.
"Don’t think they won’t go after innocent Americans again if they get their way,"
Last week, Smith testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” probe, the investigation that fed his case accusing Trump of trying to reverse the 2020 election results and of hoarding national security papers at Mar-a-Lago.
In opening remarks to the panel, Smith cast himself as a straight-line lawman, not a party operative.
"I am not a politician and I have no partisan loyalty,"
he said, before adding another line about his record.
"My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles upon which our country was founded."
That testimony is now colliding with a public image hard to square with neutrality: a former special counsel at a politicized music bill, in a slogan shirt, days after insisting he has no side.
Republicans have already pressed that theme hard on Capitol Hill, including through a Jim Jordan report referring Smith for criminal charges over alleged election-season misconduct.
Just the News reported that the Maryland date was Smith’s first public sighting since his Senate hearing on Tuesday, and that the festival near Washington was organized by Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello.
Saturday’s lineup featured Springsteen, the Foo Fighters, Public Enemy, Dave Matthews, and Joan Baez, among others, under the “Power to the People” banner.
An X account posted images of Smith at the venue on October 4, 2026, labeling the subject simply “Jack smith,” and the photos moved quickly through political circles.
Springsteen has not been shy about his own politics. In May, during a lengthy show at Nationals Park in Washington, he tore into Trump and called the president “racist,” “incompetent,” and “treasonous.”
Smith choosing that cultural lane, in that shirt, after a week of sworn claims about nonpartisanship, is the contrast the White House wants voters to see.
Smith’s record against Trump did not end in courtroom victories.
His Washington-based indictment was withdrawn after Trump defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024. A South Florida federal judge had earlier thrown out the classified documents case, ruling that then-Attorney General Merrick Garland unlawfully appointed Smith in November 2022, timing that came shortly after Trump announced another presidential run.
Those outcomes matter because Smith’s authority, methods, and political timing were the fight all along. Appointment power, charging decisions, and the calendar before a national election are not side issues. They are the case.
House Republicans have kept building that file, including when they released transcripts on covert subpoenas of GOP lawmakers’ phone records tied to his investigation work.
Republicans in Congress investigated Smith’s approach and accused him of abusing power, including by gaining access to lawmakers’ text messages and call logs as part of “Arctic Frost.”
That is not a vague complaint about tone. It is a charge that a federal prosecutor’s team reached into the communications of elected officials while pursuing a case against their party’s leading candidate.
Sen. Chuck Grassley’s disclosures on the same front, including reporting that Smith’s team secretly reviewed text messages of 44 members of Congress, sharpened the accountability fight still hanging over the former special counsel.
Separate from the concert story, the White House Government Transparency Task Force on Monday released declassified memos and emails described as showing the FBI monitored future White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’ phone calls.
The materials, as characterized in the release package, tie that monitoring to a broader effort to keep tabs on Trump world ahead of the classified documents indictment through a probe known as “Plasmic Echo,” including trap-and-trace methods.
A linked Just the News-hosted PDF in the release set references a March 24, 2023 contact involving Wiles, underscoring how early and how wide the surveillance net ran in the lead-up to charging decisions.
Cheung’s blast was not only about fashion at a pavilion in Maryland. It was about precedent.
If a special counsel can wrap himself in rule-of-law language before the Senate, then surface days later in political festival gear tied to a performer who branded Trump “treasonous,” voters are entitled to judge the posture for themselves.
The White House frame is blunt: Democrats used the justice system as a political weapon against Trump, Smith was the instrument, and the same machine would not hesitate to target ordinary Americans if it regained power.
That is why the shirt landed. Not because a prosecutor is barred from a rock show, but because Smith’s public brand was nonpartisan duty, and the weekend optics said otherwise.
Legal pressure around his tenure has not been limited to hearings and reports. Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s lawsuit arguing Smith should face criminal charges is part of the same unfinished accountability push.
So is the separate track in which Jim Jordan referred Smith to DOJ over alleged false statements about reading lawmakers’ texts.
The scene itself is simple. A former special counsel, out of the Justice Department spotlight, moves through a packed Maryland venue in slogan merch, nursing a beer, while a festival branded around “people power” plays on.
The politics around him are not simple. Two failed cases. An appointment a judge rejected. Senate testimony about purity of motive. Congressional claims of swept-up phone records and texts. Fresh White House releases on FBI monitoring of a future chief of staff.
And now a “No Kings” shirt under Springsteen lights, just after Smith told Congress he has no partisan loyalty to anyone.
Americans can live with prosecutors who like arena rock. They should not have to swallow lectures on nonpartisanship from officials whose public choices keep advertising a side.
When the people who preached neutral justice keep showing their politics in public, voters should believe the evidence, not the press conference.
