Welcome to the beat with Ari Melber. We have a big show for you tonight, Wednesday, December 27th.

Prosecutor Renato Mariotti will join me in a few minutes as we look at Jack Smith's big coup case against Donald Trump, which faces a key appeal in January.

How will Smith draw on his past experience?

That's where we begin tonight.

He's a tough but low profile prosecutor with a very long record. He led difficult and

victorious cases including the prosecution of New York police officer Justin Volpe,

who tortured Abner Leym Louima a notorious case that delivered

a 30-year prison sentence, unheard of for police at the time.

Smith was a younger federal prosecutor then.

He went on to develop something of an expertise in the hard cases that

other lawyers sometimes duck

the kind of cases that go at the powerful in government or police senators

heads of state. He developed experience with the pressures of those specific kind of cases

and something of a reputation as the kind of prosecutor you actually pick up and call

with a tough case like that.

Smith did stints in federal and local prosecutor's office in New York and that's as you

can imagine one of the busiest and most intricate places to try a big case in America.

So we're going to lean in, take the facts, and figure out what his records suggest about the

work he's doing now, and we have some rare footage of Smith in action.

Here's some of what we've learned.

One, Jack Smith is steeped in the challenges of prosecuting heads of state.

He's one of the few living American prosecutors who's even done it abroad as a war crimes

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