His father worked as a commercial property air-conditioning systems draftsman, and his mother did not work outside the home for most of Jack’s early years, though she also has been employed sometimes at a data-processing center. Smith, who is 54, grew up in Clay, N.Y., a sturdy, middle-class community just north of Syracuse, where, even now, the average home costs about $150,000, according to the city’s website.
Trump, the former president who loves to put his name on everything, has tried to belittle the special counsel’s name as so commonplace it sounds made up. There are more than 250 attorneys in America named John or Jack Smith, according to the Martindale-Hubbell database. The records of that case, and how it played out, are all there in a riot of banker’s boxes at the federal court in Brooklyn that - irony alert - were borrowed by a federal official from the National Archives many years ago yet, as happens with some of the millions of federal documents, were still floating out there unreturned, where they were found by The Washington Post. What has been forgotten to time is that Smith once faced in court a real Joker, a real Messiah and a real Psycho. And intent is a concept Smith has internalized. At its core, it’s about one man’s interpretations of the other man’s intent.
