This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

Multiple legal experts say Jack Smith's campaign to make President Trump a criminal should have ended before it even started because a private citizen has no authority to bring any criminal charges against anyone.

According to a report in the Washington Times, the comments come from former President Ronald Reagan's attorney general and two law professors who clerked for the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese and professors Steven Calabresi and Gary Lawson have filed a 25-page brief in the Supreme Court pointing out that there's no constitutional authority for current Attorney General Merrick Garland's assignment to Smith to do such a high-level criminal investigation.

The reason? He's a private citizen and not confirmed by the Senate.

He had been a U.S. attorney at one point, but was gone from government service and living in the Netherlands when Garland reached out and picked him, the report said.

The experts "say a lawfully appointed special counsel would have had to serve in the Justice Department after being appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Lawful special counsel appointments in the past, they said, included Patrick Fitzgerald, who served as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Rod Rosenstein, who was also a U.S. attorney, as were John Huber and John Durham."

Their filing charges, "What federal statutes and the Constitution do not allow, however, is for the attorney general to appoint a private citizen, who has never been confirmed by the Senate, as a substitute United States attorney under the title ‘special counsel.’ That is what happened on November 18, 2022. That appointment was unlawful, as are all the legal actions that have flowed from it."

Smith, the citizen, in fact, is prosecuting felony charges against Trump relating to his comments and actions regarding the 2020 presidential election, which evidence has confirmed was subject to multiple undue influences.

One was the massive amount of money, more than $400 million, that Mark Zuckerberg handed out to election officials who largely used it to recruit Joe Biden supporters. Never before has such an amount been used to influence an election, and this money all was outside of the normal election funding processes that are monitored.

Further, the FBI's interference – agents told media corporations to suppress accurate but damaging reporting about the Biden family's international schemes while they knew the information was accurate – was found by a poll to likely have cost Trump the victory.

The case now is pending before an appeals court, and the issue of Smith's lack of qualifications could yet come up.