Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel tasked with overseeing criminal investigations into former president Donald Trump, hired a prosecutor who previously shocked defense attorneys by bullying and threatening suspects and gloating about his power.
Smith tapped Matthew Burke to join his team as assistant special counsel in 2022. Months earlier, Burke drew scrutiny as an assistant U.S. attorney for his handling of a case involving an Amazon real estate deal. That January, Burke unleashed extraordinarily aggressive rhetoric on men who had not been charged with a crime, but who Amazon suspected of involvement in alleged kickback schemes.
“You have picked a fight that you cannot win,” Burke told the men, threatening that “you will get what you deserve,” and adding that “any decision of prosecution team effectively will be appeal-proof and will be undeniably correct,” according to a recording of the call reviewed by The Daily Wire.
Burke told the men that Amazon’s civil suit left them in an “impossible position” with only two choices: to lie in depositions, in which case he would prosecute them for perjury, or to refuse to answer, in which case they were likely to lose the lawsuit because their silence made them seem guilty. He did not seem to allow for the possibility that the men could tell the truth and win the case.
Two of the men later pleaded guilty to crimes, perhaps swayed by Burke’s swashbuckling rhetoric and ominous comments about how expensive lawyers are. But Burke’s certainty was misplaced. The judge hearing the civil lawsuit — which Burke had implored the parties to stall, saying it interfered with his criminal probe — dismissed virtually all the charges, finding that Amazon did not lose money, its employees did not violate their employment contracts, and claims that they took insider info were essentially setups by Amazon. The DOJ later vacated the men’s guilty pleas.
Smith tapping Burke could raise concerns about the impartiality of the effort to convict Trump. Trump has called Smith a “scoundrel” and vowed to fire him if he retakes the presidency. Smith’s probe comes after another special counsel, Robert Mueller, derailed much of Trump’s first term with a multi-year investigation into purported ties to Russia, which turned out to be false. Though Mueller claimed his probe was nonpartisan, it was largely run by Andrew Weissmann, an attorney who is now an openly partisan MSNBC contributor.
Lawyer Amy Nelson, the wife of Carl Nelson — one of the Amazon employees who was on the call and had his money seized by Burke despite never being charged with a crime — told The Daily Wire that her family’s experience has led her to view a prosecution of Trump by Smith and Burke as a miscarriage of justice.
“Every American should be afraid of this because it could happen to you. One day there’s a knock on the door and they’re not asking you whether you committed a crime, they’re telling you,” she said.
“I spent my life in Democrat politics. I was on Obama’s national finance committee. Five years ago I would have believed Merrick Garland” when he said it was a conspiracy theory to suggest that the Department of Justice targets some people while letting others go free. “Now I just don’t even know what to think of American democracy. It seems so transparent that they waited to go after [Trump] on a federal level until they knew he was running,” she said.
Nelson and Casey Kirschner were real estate transaction managers for Amazon, while Brian Watson was CEO of Northstar, a real estate firm that leased properties to Amazon. Kirschner’s brother Christian, who worked as a referral partner for Northstar, received a finder’s fee on a data center deal. In April 2020, Amazon sued alleging improper kickbacks. Prosecutors also began working closely with Amazon, even holding weekend calls with them.
Before anyone had been charged with a crime, Burke wrote to lawyers making the highly unusual request that he speak to them directly, rather than through counsel. He wrote that if the men did not join the call, he would “not waste any of the government’s time repeating ourselves.”
He told the men they were “on incredibly perilous ground” and that he would “gather every shred of civil discovery and review it, and then you will have handed us something else to indict” for perjury, even if they had not committed any other crime.
The call was so aggressive that The Washington Post reported on it at the time, calling it a “strange government intervention.”
An FBI agent seized attorney-client privileged information from Nelson, despite being warned about its protected status, and sent it to Burke. Burke said the agent would be removed from the case only because his “senior management” ordered it. Afterward, Burke admitted to being “a dick” without apology, according to a letter from a defense attorney in the case to Burke’s supervisor, obtained by The Daily Wire.
“The reason I was a dick is because all of you people need to be told you’re being idiots,” Burke said, according to the letter from Stanley L. Garnett, an attorney for Brian Watson.
The letter was sent to Burke’s boss, Eastern District of Virginia U.S. Attorney Jessica Aber. In it, Garnett said Burke’s “behavior was improper, unethical, and worthy of your immediate attention.”
Burke was removed from the case soon after, but it was not a disciplinary measure, but rather because he had been promoted to ply his trade against the former president.
Smith and Aber — at the time an assistant US attorney–previously worked together to prosecute former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell for “honest services fraud” — the same allegation levied in the Amazon case — for receiving gifts from businessmen, despite not doing anything in return. The conviction was unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court, which wrote that they were relying on a definition that would allow “boundless” prosecution of politicians. McDonnell said Smith would “rather win than get it right.”
Garnett’s letter of complaint about Burke said that the defense attorneys “cannot think of even a roughly similar scenario, where a prosecutor overtly threatened clients directly, advising them that truthful testimony in a civil suit is an ‘impossible situation’ and announcing that any misstep in a complex civil suit will automatically result in federal prosecution.”
Burke also told the men, “If you are innocent, we will know that and walk away.” Amy Nelson told The Daily Wire that he had forgotten the presumption of innocence. “If you are innocent? Isn’t it if you are guilty?” she said.
Burke’s admonition that the men were in a “fight that you cannot win” was also false. In April 2023, a federal judge dismissed the majority of the civil lawsuit, and in January, prosecutors said they were closing the investigation, declining to charge Nelson and others, and asking a judge to undo the convictions of the men who had pleaded guilty.
Nonetheless, the federal government has seized hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Nelsons and refused to return some of the money, despite the probe being dropped. They even seized funds from Amy’s father, which they had sent him to pay for kidney transplant treatment, leaving other family members to step in to prevent his death, she said.
“My husband abided by what was authorized in his employment contract,” yet “we lost our home. Someone else lives there. We’ll never get it back,” she added.
The special counsel’s office did not return a request for comment.
