Special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two criminal investigations against Donald Trump, resigned on Friday ahead of the president-elect’s inauguration.
Smith’s expected departure was revealed in a court filing that Justice Department officials submitted to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida on Saturday, asking her to refrain from extending a court order used to block the release of Smith’s final confidential report summarizing the two federal Trump probes. Those cases are now closed.
Smith’s plans to step down from his appointed position were first reported by the New York Times in November following Trump’s electoral victory. If Smith stayed, Trump would have fired him “within two seconds” of taking office on January 20, as the Republican said in October.
In a footnote, the document says Smith completed his work in those investigations and submitted the report to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday.
The Justice Department argued that Cannon holds no authority to block the release of Smith’s findings through a court order.
The Trump-appointed judge dismissed the classified documents probe in July over Garland’s unconstitutional appointment of Smith, whom the president did not nominate and the Senate did not confirm for his prosecutorial position. Moreover, Congress did not appropriate funds to Smith’s investigation as required under federal law.
Cannon temporarily blocked the Justice Department from publicly releasing Smith’s report on the documents case until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta ruled otherwise. While the department abandoned its appeal of Cannon’s dismissal regarding Trump, Garland maintained the appeal regarding Trump’s two co-defendants, Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.
The co-defendants were indicted in Smith’s classified documents case, which accused Trump of illegally retaining sensitive national security information at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he left the White House in 2021.
Both of Trump’s federal indictments are now effectively dead after Smith sought to dismiss his January 6 election interference case and dropped the Mar-a-Lago documents case after the election, in light of the Justice Department’s longstanding policy of not prosecuting incumbent presidents.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., granted Smith’s motion to dismiss all felony charges in the January 6 case, which alleged that Trump conspired to overturn his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.