Special counsel Jack Smith said Monday that he is dropping the federal election subversion case against President-elect Donald Trump, seeking the case’s dismissal in a court filing with the judge.
Trump has said he would fire Smith once he retook the office, shattering previous norms around special counsel investigations.
“The (Justice) Department’s position is that the Constitution requires that this case be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated,” Smith wrote in a six-page filing.
“This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant.”
Smith’s criminal pursuit of Trump over the last two years for trying to subvert the 2020 presidential election and his mishandling of classified documents represented an extraordinarily unique chapter in American history: Never before has a former occupant of the White House faced federal criminal charges.
Though the election subversion case culminated in a landmark Supreme Court ruling this summer that said Trump enjoyed some presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, Trump’s strategy of delay in the case ensured that a trial never got underway before the November election.
In the election case Trump faced in Washington, DC, Smith charged the then-former president over his efforts to overturn his election loss in 2020.
“The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed,” Smith said in the filing.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan had been deciding how much of Trump’s conduct at the centre of the case is shielded by immunity after prosecutors last month laid out their arguments for why the Supreme Court’s ruling should have no impact on the case.
After Trump won reelection earlier this month, prosecutors asked Chutkan to pause a series of post-election deadlines in the case as they weighed their next steps.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
State cases will continue
As president, Trump will not have the power to interfere with the prosecutions brought against him by state authorities in Georgia and New York.
However, the courts in those cases will still have to work out immunity questions and issues raised by his return to the White House.
Last week, the judge overseeing Trump’s criminal hush money case in New York postponed his sentencing indefinitely.
A jury in the state convicted Trump earlier this year on 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush money payment made during the 2016 campaign to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who alleged a prior affair with the president-elect. (Trump denies the affair.)
And Trump is still working to stave off prosecution in Georgia, where he is a defendant in a sprawling RICO case that accuses him and several allies of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss in the Peach State.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
