Getty ImagesWith special counsel Jack Smith’s move on Wednesday to drop the 2020 election interference prosecution against Donald Trump, one of the last remaining legal threats against the president-elect has turned to ash and blown away in the wind.
Smith is also abandoning an appeal of a federal judge’s dismissal of his case against Trump for mishandling sensitive national security documents after leaving the White House in 2021.
Those were two of the biggest, most imposing judicial proceedings against Trump, which had been hanging over his head for more than a year as he began his slow, steady march back to the White House.
His victory in November, and the prospect that he would unceremoniously end what he called a “political hijacking” of the legal system upon taking office in January, removed much of the drama from Smith’s Monday announcement.
It was not a legal or political earthquake so much as a reflection of the new balance of power in the nation’s capital.
Department of Justice guidance prohibits the criminal prosecution of a sitting president. In his filing, Smith said that the DoJ recently concluded that this legal protection also applies to the prosecution of a private citizen who is subsequently elected president.
“That prohibition is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the government stands fully behind,” he writes.
Such insistences on the strength and validity of the case will be cold comfort for those who had been clamouring for Trump to be held accountable for the violence surrounding the 6 January, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by the president-elect’s supporters.
The Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland have been sharply criticised by some on the left, and among Trump opponents on the right, for moving too slowly in bringing cases against the then-former president after he left office – setting up the kind of resolution that played out on Monday.
Federal investigators focused their early efforts on prosecuting individuals who were directly involved in the Capitol attack, while a special committee of the US House of Representatives, then under control of Democrats, held hearings and gathered testimony against Trump.
It wasn’t until Trump launched his third White House bid in November 2022 that Garland appointed Smith to handle an independent investigation – ultimately resulting in 37 counts of document-handling and obstruction of justice against the president in June 2023 and four election interference charges two months later.
Trump’s legal team vigorously contested those prosecutions, filing a flurry of legal challenges to the validity of the claims and delaying any attempt to bring the cases to trial. It wasn’t long before some of those efforts paid off.
And with every success, even temporary ones, the calendar ticked ever closer to the November 2024 presidential election, when a victory by the former president could bring those prosecutions to a grinding halt.
In June, the US Supreme Court held that current and former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for their official actions, casting doubt on the election-interference case.
Then, in July, the judge overseeing the documents case dismissed those charges, ruling that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was invalid because it was not approved by Congress – a requirement that had not been applied to previous investigations.
Smith pressed on, retooling his election-interference indictment and appealing against the document-case dismissal. But the timeline for any trials had disappeared over the horizon.
And with Trump’s election victory – and the near certainty that his administration would drop the cases once they took power – the final resolution was all but inevitable.
Smith’s decision to abandon the prosecutions amounted to little more than an early mercy killing – one that was quickly celebrated by the Trump team.
“Today’s decision by the DoJ ends the unconstitutional federal cases against President Trump and is a major victory for the rule of law,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung wrote in a statement.
“The American people and President Trump want an immediate end to the political weaponisation of our justice system, and we look forward to uniting our country.”
There is still the possibility that Trump will be sentenced in his New York criminal conviction for hush-money payments earlier this year, but his lawyers are pressing for that case to be thrown out.
The sprawling multi-party indictments for election interference in Georgia is not affected by Smith’s decision, but it currently exists in legal limbo amidst efforts to remove Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis from the case. Neither at the moment appears to present a serious legal threat to the incoming president.
Smith has promised to continue his appeal of prosecutions of Trump’s associates in the documents case, but Trump could end that upon taking office in January with the flick of his pardoning pen.
After years of living in legal jeopardy, Trump’s election victory appears to have all but wiped away those concerns, leaving four years to focus on governing and implementing his agenda. It is perhaps the most immediate and tangible consequence of his return to the apex of political power.
More than a year of work by dozens of government lawyers, including hundreds of interviews and subpoenas and millions of dollars spent, has ended not with the bang of a gavel, but with the click of an electronic court filing.
North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the presidential election in his twice weekly US Election Unspun newsletter. Readers in the UK can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.
