Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought two failed federal prosecutions against President-elect Donald J. Trump, resigned this week, according to a footnote buried in court papers — a remarkably muted conclusion to a fight that redefined the nation’s legal and political landscape.
Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor who fought a bitter and protracted battle on two fronts with the Trump legal team but lost in both a district court and in the Supreme Court shaped by Trump, left his offices in Washington on Friday, according to a senior law enforcement official.
His departure was expected. Smith had signalled his intention to leave before Trump, who had threatened to fire and punish him, took office on January 20.
In the end, Smith made no formal announcement. His spokesman had no comment.
The special counsel departed after his efforts in the courtroom were essentially rendered moot by Trump’s political victory in November. Under a justice department policy prohibiting the pursuit of prosecutions against a sitting President, Smith was compelled to drop both of the cases he had filed against Trump in 2023 — one in Florida, accusing him of mishandling a trove of classified documents, and
the other in Washington, on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
Smith’s final week was marked by one more legal setback at the hands of Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump-appointed jurist presiding over the Florida documents case: She temporarily blocked the public release of his final report until at least Monday.
The monumental legal saga, which embittered Trump and steeled him for his remarkable return to power, ended with a single line at the bottom of the last page of a brief sent to Judge Cannon on Saturday: “The special counsel completed his work and submitted his final confidential report on January 7, 2025, and separated from the department on January 10”.
Smith’s resignation left unfinished one last step in the more than two-year odyssey he undertook by investigating and ultimately bringing charges against Trump: the release of a two-volume report detailing his decision-making in both criminal cases.
Trump’s lawyers and lawyers for his two co-defendants in the documents case have been fighting fiercely for the past week to stop the release of both volumes. In court papers, they have assailed the report as a “one-sided” and “unlawful” political attack against the President-elect and complained it unfairly implicates some unnamed “anticipated” members of his incoming administration.
The report amounts to Smith’s valedictory word on the work he started when he was first appointed in November 2022, shortly after Trump announced he was running again for President. It contains his explanations of why he brought the charges he did in the two cases as well as his legal reasoning for not bringing other charges.
Each of the cases died in different ways.
The classified documents case was dismissed outright by Judge Cannon in a July ruling that found — against decades of precedent — that Smith had been unlawfully appointed to his job as special counsel.
Around the same time, the Supreme Court hobbled the election interference case in a landmark ruling that granted Trump a broad form of immunity for official acts he took as President. The ruling not only called into question many of the allegations in Smith’s indictment, but more important, made it impossible to hold a trial on the charges before the election.
New York Times News Service