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Special counsel Jack Smith has completed his work on two criminal investigations of President-elect Donald Trump and resigned Friday from the Justice Department.
Word of Smith’s departure came in a footnote to a court filing Justice Department officials submitted to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon Saturday afternoon, urging her not to extend a court order she issued last week temporarily blocking the release of the final report Smith submitted to department leaders on Tuesday.
Justice Department officials say Cannon’s order overstepped her authority and that she has no power to block Attorney General Merrick Garland from releasing Smith’s findings. Her ban on disclosure of Smith’s report currently runs through Monday.
Garland has said he plans to release publicly only the portion of Smith’s report that covers his investigation into Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election. The attorney general has said in court filings that he agreed with a recommendation from Smith to keep the other volume — which addresses the probe into Trump’s possession of a raft of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after he left office in 2021 — under wraps due to prosecutors’ ongoing efforts to revive a criminal case against two Trump allies and former co-defendants. Instead, Garland intends only to show that report to a handful of members of Congress.
Smith’s resignation before the end of President Joe Biden’s term was widely expected and foreshadowed by other Justice Department officials. Trump has repeatedly urged that Smith be prosecuted for his handling of the Trump cases and has even suggested that he be thrown out of the United States.
A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment on Smith’s exit. A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Smith’s departure ends one of the most extraordinary and tumultuous chapters in the Justice Department’s history, resulting in grave criminal charges against Trump, the first former president to ever face prosecution.
But both of Smith’s cases were stymied by the courts. Cannon dismissed the documents case in July, ruling that Garland lacked the authority to appoint Smith in the first place. And the Supreme Court sidelined the 2020 election case for months while it considered Trump’s claim to be immune from the charges — resulting in a landmark ruling enshrining sweeping presidential immunity.
Ultimately, it was Trump’s election to a second term that ended both cases. Smith dropped his pursuit of both prosecutions shortly after Trump was declared the winner, citing the Justice Department’s longstanding policy against prosecuting a sitting president. That cleared the way for Smith to capture his findings in the final report he submitted to Garland this week.
Intense litigation over the release of Smith’s report began earlier this week and has continued into the weekend. While Cannon, a Trump appointee, put a temporary hold on the release of the report, Justice Department officials have asked the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to lift her order.
The fight has left a muddle over when the public will see even the portion of Smith’s report related to the 2020 election. Garland has indicated he won’t release it until he is no longer under a court order that blocks him from doing so. The 11th Circuit has not signaled how quickly it will move to resolve the matter. Though the court initially rejected the effort by Trump and his former Florida co-defendants to block the report, it has not yet acted to disturb Cannon’s order, which blocks Garland from releasing the report until at least Monday night.
Trump’s two former co-defendants — Walter Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira — have asked Cannon to extend the order and to ensure that any information Garland is permitted to release has no bearing on them. However, the Justice Department noted in its filing Saturday that it has appealed Cannon’s order, which typically blocks a district court judge from tinkering with it until the appeals court acts and formally returns the case.
If the report doesn’t emerge by the time Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20, it’s unclear when and if it would be officially released by DOJ officials who answer to Trump.
Though Trump and his allies have warned that aspects of the report might leak if Garland is permitted to share it with Congress, the only details of the report that have become public came from Trump and his attorneys, who spent three days this month reviewing the report. In a letter, Trump’s allies attached to a court filing, Trump’s lawyers indicated that the 2020 election report characterized Trump as being “engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort,” as “the head of the criminal conspiracies” and concluded that he harbored a “criminal design.”
And Trump suggested in a press conference last week that he anticipates the final report will clock in at 500 pages.
