Former special counsel Jack Smith spoke at the University College London as part of a discussion with former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann.

While Smith walked through his time at the International Criminal Court, the second half of the discussion dealt specifically with his time working on the prosecution of then-former President Donald Trump.

Weissmann specifically asked about the classified documents case and why he brought the case to Florida. He recalled the critics who were second-guessing that decision.

"So, two things here. One is kind of the — I just wanted to address the note you said about, you know, some people criticize things," Smith began. "The idea of people criticizing things, particularly in the media, if you are a good prosecutor, that is noise and you need to tune it out."

"In terms of the actual case, it was very important to me that we do all our work by the book. And that means the same way you do it in a DOJ case if it wasn't a case of this much public interest. And under that way of thinking, the place to do this was in Florida," Smith said.

"There were arguments you could venue parts of it other places certainly, but and there are times that the DOJ venue has pieces of cases in different places," he noted.

Smith said the documents were located in Florida, and the two major acts of obstruction of justice charges also happened in the state. It also would have further enforced the idea that these crimes were not "official acts" because they took place not in Washington, but in Florida.

Weissmann compared the Trump case to the documents former Vice President Mike Pence had and President Joe Biden had from his time also as vice president. He asked to compare the two when he charged Trump, but former special counsel Robert Hur did not.

"The difference are the facts," Smith said.

"One of the major differences between the two cases is the obstructive conduct in the case that I investigated," he said of Trump. "One reason is to prove illegal possession of classified documents, you need to show that you possess the documents, or the defendant possessed the documents, willfully. And that means he knew what he was doing was wrong, and he knew he was possessing the documents. In my particular case, we had tons of evidence of willfulness," said Smith.

Trump's refusal to give the documents back, efforts to hide the documents and publicly saying that they were "his" documents were all a part of that evidence, Smith said. That didn't exist in the Pence and Biden cases.

"I want to make sure I get this pretty close to right, but almost four times as many documents in the person I was investigating compared to the other case," said Smith of Trump. He also said the sensitivity was different. Biden's were over 15 years old, while Trump's were still active and classified.

He went on to say that the charges that they brought in both cases, "We had core charges that we did bring that we thought were very supported in law, very factually supported. The statutes that we did charge had a long history of use in the United States. They've been interpreted by the Supreme Court. And we felt we had a strong case and that those charges that we brought would allow us to present all the relevant evidence to a jury, that we would be able to present everything that mattered to a jury."

One reason he didn't charge Trump with incitement or an insurrection is that there is "very little case law interpreting" those charges.

"Certainly not to this extent that the other statutes that we brought. Incitement understands the reaction, and I could see where people could find this to be incitement. But at the same time, as you know, that's a very high standard under the First Amendment. ... Frankly, I did not think that those were fights that we needed to take on given the charges that we were able to otherwise bring."