White House communications director Steven Cheung labeled former special counsel Jack Smith a “scumbag” after he wore a “No Kings” shirt to a Bruce Springsteen concert.
Photos and video from the weekend caught the longtime prosecutor at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., nursing a beer and making his way to his seat in the partisan slogan tee. The images landed just days after Smith told senators he has no partisan loyalty.
The New York Post reported that Cheung answered Monday on X, framing the concert look as fresh proof of the politics behind Smith’s two criminal cases against President Trump ahead of the 2024 election.
Cheung did not mince words.
"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 added a warning aimed at anyone who thinks the chapter is closed.
"Don’t think they won’t go after innocent Americans again if they get their way,"
Smith, 57, had spent years as a federal prosecutor before then-Attorney General Merrick Garland named him special counsel in November 2022, shortly after Trump announced another run for the White House. He brought a D.C. case tied to the 2020 election and a classified-documents case centered on Mar-a-Lago. Both collapsed after Trump defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, the D.C. indictment withdrawn, the documents case thrown out by a South Florida federal judge who ruled the appointment unlawful.
Last week he sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee and cast himself as a neutral guardian of the law.
"I am not a politician and I have no partisan loyalty,"
Smith told the panel in his opening remarks, continuing:
"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."
The Maryland stop was billed as a “Power to the People” show featuring Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Foo Fighters, Public Enemy, Dave Matthews, Joan Baez, and others. Smith wore a Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band shirt along with the “No Kings” tee. An X account posted media of him at the venue on October 4, 2026, and the clip spread fast.
Just The News reported the appearance as Smith’s first public sighting since his Senate hearing on Tuesday, and noted the shirt came from Springsteen’s Land of Hope and Dreams tour. The festival, organized by Tom Morello, was staged in Maryland to showcase “the power everyday human beings have when they come together, through music, art, community and action, to shape our country and our planet on, and beyond, Election Day.” Springsteen performed the anti-ICE song “Streets of Minneapolis,” and Dave Grohl reportedly dedicated a number to “his favorite Jack.”
Morello closed the night by telling the crowd, “Hopefully you’ve been energized, radicalized, revolutionized, democratized and wound the f, k up.” The politics of the bill were not subtle. In May, Springsteen had already torn into Trump at a Nationals Park show in Washington, calling the president “racist,” “incompetent,” and “treasonous.”
That is the company Smith chose for his first easy public outing after sworn testimony about neutrality. Voters who watched years of lawfare did not need a press release to read the room.
Republicans in Congress had been digging into Smith’s methods long before the concert video. They accused his team of abusing power by gaining access to lawmakers’ text messages and call logs during the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” work that fed the election case. Separate reporting has detailed how Smith’s team accessed lawmakers’ text messages while cutting past its own safeguards.
The same probe machinery reached deeper into Trump’s orbit. On Monday, the White House Government Transparency Task Force released declassified memos and emails showing the FBI monitored phone calls of future White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. Trap-and-trace collection was one tool in a broader “Plasmic Echo” effort that tracked the future president’s circle ahead of the classified-documents indictment.
Those releases fit a pattern already mapped in coverage of how investigators logged calls tied to Trump lawyers by watching Wiles’ phone traffic. Officials can call it routine process. Ordinary Americans call it a warning about what a weaponized Justice Department is willing to touch.
Smith’s D.C. indictment accused Trump of trying to reverse the 2020 results. The Mar-a-Lago case alleged hoarding of national security papers. Neither delivered the political knockout some Democrats wanted before voters spoke. After Trump won, the D.C. case went away. A South Florida judge had already discarded the documents prosecution on the appointment defect tied to Garland’s November 2022 order.
House investigators have since piled on with findings that the Biden-era Justice Department spied on GOP lawmakers while Smith’s Trump cases ran, a charge laid out in a House Judiciary report on those surveillance claims. Other accounts describe a federal agent saying the team hid that subpoenaed phone data belonged to members of Congress, and senators have pressed claims that the probe seized reporter texts and thousands of donors’ bank records.
Smith still insists he is no politician. The “No Kings” shirt at a Springsteen protest bill is not the wardrobe of a man allergic to political signaling. It is the wardrobe of a man comfortable in the activist lane after using the charging power of the federal government against his party’s chief opponent.
Cheung’s broadside will strike critics as rough. The underlying grievance is not fashion. It is the gap between solemn Senate language about the rule of law and a public uniform that matches the left’s street slogan set.
Garland installed Smith after Trump re-entered the race. The special counsel then drove two headline cases into the heart of a presidential campaign. Courts and an election later removed the cases. What remains is the residue: monitored phones, scraped messages, donor records fights, and a former prosecutor flashing movement merch under arena lights.
Grassley’s office and other Republicans have kept the pressure on the scope of seizures and message grabs, including claims the probe took reporter texts and donor bank records in the Trump-related inquiry. Each new disclosure makes Smith’s “no partisan loyalty” line harder to sell to anyone outside the cable panels that cheered the indictments.
The White House is treating the concert clip as more than celebrity gossip. Cheung cast Smith as the tip of a Democratic legal spear and said the same crowd will aim at “innocent Americans” if it regains a freer hand. That is a political argument. It is also an argument rooted in what Smith’s office actually did with grand juries, subpoenas, and FBI collection tools.
Smith can swear he only followed facts. He cannot unsay the Senate lines, and he cannot unwear the shirt. Cameras at Merriweather Post Pavilion put the contradiction in plain view for a national audience that already lived through the cases.
Law-and-order voters were told these prosecutions were sacred duty. They looked like election-season force. A “No Kings” tee at a “Power to the People” bill does not clear that smell. It confirms it.
When the prosecutor who chased a president chooses protest merch for a night out, he tells the country exactly which team he plays for, and why self-government still requires a Justice Department that fears the law more than it fears the wrong election result.
