Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell spoke out against special counsel Jack Smith, the prosecutor pursuing federal charges against former President Donald Trump, who was also involved in a case against McDonnell close to 10 years ago.
"The troubling part for me is that I knew in my heart and my legal analysis ... that the allegations against me and my wife at the time were completely wrong," McDonnell told WMAL radio in Washington on Wednesday.
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The former governor had extensive legal expertise as an attorney, serving as a JAG officer in the Army Reserve. He was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates from 1992 to 2006 and Virginia attorney general from 2006 to 2009.
McDonnell and his wife were charged with improperly accepting gifts and loans from a donor. Their convictions were later overturned.
"I basically set up meetings for a businessman in Virginia. I didn't even go to the meetings. Spoke well of his business which I did for thousands of companies promoting Virginia jobs. And because it was a donor and had given gifts to us which were legal and reported, it was somehow a crime," he said.
Smith's prosecution cost the governor $28 million in legal fees and three and half years of "very difficult times" for his family.
The end result of the investigation and legal troubles was a unanimous Supreme Court decision overturning the governor's corruption conviction.
The court’s opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, called the position of the federal prosecutors “boundless” in their definition of the act of simply agreeing to meet with someone and was insufficient to trigger a corruption conviction.
“There is no doubt that this case is distasteful; it may be worse than that. But our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns. It is instead with the broader legal implications of the Government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute,” Roberts wrote in the 2016 decision.
Roberts added, "Setting up a meeting, calling another public official, or hosting an event does not, standing alone, qualify as an ‘official act.'”
The case was remanded to a lower court and three months later, the Justice Department dismissed the charges against McDonnell and his wife Maureen.
McDonnell said that "it says a lot" that all of the Supreme Court justices, including the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, all agreed on a unanimous decision in favor of McDonnell.
"I've been a governor, prosecutor, and attorney general. I think we have the best justice system in the world but it's not perfect."
McDonnell said his attorneys at the time went to the deputy attorney general and they had a 40-page brief laying out the law and facts of how the case needed to be thrown out but "yet they persisted."
McDonnell went on to lay out how Smith had a history of "partisan" legal overreach in the government.
"He and his team told Lois Lerner at the IRS. He said it was OK to target certain conservatives and audit their tax returns. The botched the case against the former vice presidential candidate John Edwards that lead to a mistrial. They ended up in a hung jury in the Bob Menendez case and then you got my case," he said.
The former Virginia governor said that Smith's legal history shows him that the prosecutor is very "partisan" in high-profile cases and "exercised bad judgment" with "overzealousness about charging."
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Smith on Tuesday revealed accusations against former President Donald Trump of attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election in coordination with six alleged co-conspirators.
The former Virginia governor currently serves as a professor at Regent University and runs the McDonnell Group, a real estate consulting firm. He and his wife Maureen divorced in 2020.