With some people, you can tell just by looking at ‘em.

Jack Smith is one such person. No, he doesn’t exude the fist-clenching smarminess of, say, Peter Strzok or James Comey or Adam Schiff, but still. This guy, to borrow a phrase from CNN, has a really punchable face. (I’m not advocating violence here. Just making an observation.)

My gripe with Smith, though, has never been about countenance so much as competence, which he lacks utterly — not only in terms of constitutional precedent but also prosecutorial decency and discretion.

Last month, Smith, that beady-eyed, sweaty-browed zealot of an unconstitutional special persecutor, sat for a closed-door deposition with Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee. To his credit, Smith actually answered their questions — which is more than we can say for some of his deputies, one of whom invoked the Fifth more than 70 times.

As Fox News reports: “The interview was Smith’s first time appearing before Congress since he left his role as special counsel in 2024. And while much of the information was not new, the exchange was punctuated by sharp exchanges with Republicans on the panel, both on the strength of the case and on his own actions taken during the course of the probe.”

A transcript of Smith’s testimony has since been released, and a date — January 22 — has been set for his public testimony.

As for those actions by Smith, they included the snatching up of phone records of eight Republican senators — Marsha Blackburn, Lindsey Graham, Bill Hagerty, Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, Cynthia Lummis, Dan Sullivan, and Tommy Tuberville — with a diabolical warning to the phone carriers not to alert the senators that he’d done so. Republicans have argued that this confiscation was illegal because it runs afoul of the Constitution’s Article I, Section 6, Clause 1, which grants legislative immunity for actions that are part of the legitimate legislative process.

“I made my decisions in the investigation without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election,” Smith said in his opening statement that day. “We took actions based on what the facts and the law required.”

Uh-huh. Did the law “require” Smith to flush Donald Trump’s First Amendment protections down the toilet?

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan pressed Smith on this point — that he’d prosecuted Trump on a matter of protected speech — Trump’s steadfast claim that the 2020 election had been stolen, had been rigged in favor of basement-bound Joe Biden.

Said Smith in response: “Absolutely not. If they are made to target a lawful government function and they are made with knowing falsity, no, they are not. That was my point about fraud not being protected by the First Amendment.”

This is laughable, and every first-year law student knows it. As constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley reminds us, the Supreme Court has held that even knowingly false statements are protected speech — to say nothing of speech that one believes to be true.

“Calling such claims 'fraud’ does not convert protected speech into criminal speech,” Turley added. “Trump was speaking at a rally about his belief that the election was stolen and should not be certified. Many citizens supported that view. It was clearly protected political speech.”

Even the Trump-deranged editorial board of The Washington Post has come to grips with reality. In an opinion piece titled “Jack Smith Would Have Blown a Hole in the First Amendment,” they write, “Political speech — including speech about elections, no matter how odious — is strongly protected by the First Amendment. It’s not unusual for politicians to take factual liberties. The main check on such misdirection is public scrutiny, not criminal prosecution.”

Remember: This is the same Jack Smith who ordered the FBI to go snooping around in Melania Trump’s underwear drawer. And it’s the same Jack Smith whose politically driven prosecution of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell for corruption cost the Republican defendant $28 million in legal fees and cost his family three and a half years of their lives. How bad was Smith’s overreach in that case? This bad: The Supreme Court ultimately overturned the conviction on a unanimous vote. Indeed, not even the High Court’s avowed leftists could stomach Smith’s prosecutorial sleaziness.

When the dust finally settles on Smith’s J6 persecution of Donald Trump, this much we can be certain of: Both the president and the First Amendment will have been utterly vindicated. And Jack Smith will have been relegated to the dustbin of history.