Special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two failed federal indictments against President-elect Donald J. Trump, resigned this week, according to a footnote in a court filing — a fight that reshaped the legal and political landscape of the United States. low-key ending.
Mr. Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor who fought a hard-fought and protracted battle on two fronts with Mr. Trump’s legal team but failed both in district courts and in Mr. Trump’s shaping Supreme Court, said on Sunday Five left the office in Washington.
His departure was expected. Mr. Smith had signaled his intention to leave before Trump took office on January 20, and Trump had threatened to fire and punish him.
Ultimately, Mr. Smith made no official statement. His spokesman had no comment.
The special counsel left after his efforts in court were rendered largely moot by Trump’s political victory in November. Under the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president, Smith was forced to drop two cases filed against Trump in 2023 – one in Florida accusing him of mishandling a trove of classified documents, and another in Washington on charges of conspiring to overthrow 2020 election.
Mr. Smith’s final week was marked by another legal setback at the hands of Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump-appointed jurist presiding over the Florida documents case: She has temporarily blocked the public release of Smith’s final report until at least Monday .
In a landmark legal saga that outraged Trump and set the stage for his remarkable return to power, a brief sent to Judge Cannon on Saturday read at the bottom of the last page: “The special counsel has completed his job, submitted a final confidential report on January 7, 2025, and resigned from the department on January 10.
Mr Smith’s resignation leaves him with the final step in his more than two-year odyssey to investigate and ultimately bring charges against Mr Trump: the release of a two-volume report detailing his decision-making in two criminal cases .
Lawyers for Trump and his two co-defendants in the documents case have been fighting fiercely over the past week to block the release of the two volumes. In court documents, they blasted the report as a “one-sided” and “illegitimate” political attack on the president-elect and complained that it unfairly implicated some unnamed “prospective” members of the incoming administration.
The report amounts to Mr. Smith’s farewell speech to the work he began when he was first appointed in November 2022, shortly after Trump announced he was running for president again. It contains his explanation for why charges were brought in those two cases and his legal reasons for not bringing other charges.
The manner of death was different in each case.
Judge Cannon dismissed the confidential documents case outright in a July ruling that violated decades of precedent and ruled that Mr. Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel. While Smith’s deputies appealed the ruling, they dropped the challenge over Trump’s concerns after his reelection, but not against his two co-defendants.
Around the same time, the election interference case was thrown into limbo with a landmark Supreme Court ruling that granted Trump broad immunity for official actions he took as president. The ruling not only casts doubt on many of the charges in Smith’s indictment but, more importantly, makes it impossible to hold a trial on those charges before the election.
Earlier this week, the Justice Department said it did not plan to immediately release Smith’s report on the classified documents case as the prosecution of former Trump co-defendants Walter Nota and Carlos de Oliveira continues. The department said it planned to show portions of the report privately to MPs and make it public once all proceedings against the pair are completed.
However, the Justice Department does plan to release a dossier on the election interference case soon. But attorneys for Nota and de Oliveira have asked Judge Cannon to extend the order blocking the report.
The two investigations into Mr. Trump were initially conducted by rank-and-file federal prosecutors. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Smith to the cases after Trump announced plans to run for president to put some distance between the investigation and the Justice Department.
In announcing the appointment of the upstate New York native, who has been the top prosecutor in The Hague investigating war crimes, Garland said Smith was “the right choice to complete these matters in a fair and urgent manner.”
Mr. Smith, 55, is an elusive figure. He did not grant interviews and kept a low profile — appearing only briefly before reporters to read a brief statement confirming his intention to investigate Trump fairly and expeditiously.
“Adherence to the rule of law is a fundamental principle of the Department of Justice,” Mr. Smith said in August 2023 when the Florida indictments were announced. Our country has one set of laws that apply to everyone.
Now, Mr. Smith and the small team of veteran prosecutors working on the Trump case may end up in Republicans’ crosshairs. Three of the Trump lawyers he opposed have been appointed to senior positions at the Justice Department and the White House by Trump, who has repeatedly suggested that those who put him in the criminal dock should face consequences.
“I defeated the deranged Jack Smith, who was a deranged man,” Trump told reporters in Florida this week. “We didn’t do anything wrong. We didn’t do anything wrong in anything.
Some Democrats, including Rep. Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, have called on President Biden to preemptively pardon Mr. Smith and his team.
