Jack Smith resigns as special counsel in Trump cases

Special counsel Jack Smith has resigned from the Justice Department after completing his work overseeing two federal prosecutions of Donald Trump, according to a government court filing.

Though Smith’s departure was expected, official word of the end of his two-year appointment came in a footnote to a court filing Saturday, as government lawyers urged a federal judge in Florida not to extend a court order temporarily blocking the release of the final report on his findings.

Smith “separated” from the department Friday, the filing said – three days after he’d submitted that document to Attorney General Merrick Garland and amid an ongoing court battle over whether it should ever be made public.

Trump and two of his former co-defendants are urging judges to keep the special counsel’s report under wraps, arguing that it would interfere with the president-elect’s orderly transition and an ongoing appeal in one of the cases Smith had brought.

Smith had spent the last two months winding down those investigations – the first into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents, the other into his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Neither of those cases ended with Trump on trial. Smith had said he intended to resign before Trump’s second inauguration, amid threats from the president-elect to fire him.

But despite Trump’s efforts to keep Smith’s report from public view, the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit on Thursday refused to stand in the way of its release.

Garland has said he intends to make public only a portion of the report – a volume outlining Smith’s findings in the election interference probe. The second volume – on the classified documents case – will only be shared with key members of Congress upon their promise not to divulge its contents, the attorney general said in a letter Wednesday to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.

Those precautions are necessary, Garland said, to protect the rights of Trump’s two former co-defendants in the documents case – longtime employees Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira – who remain defendants in an ongoing appeal.

However, Garland’s rollout plan has been stymied by a court order from U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump appointee who oversaw the documents case before dismissing the charges last year.

At the urging of Nauta and De Oliveira, she barred the Justice Department earlier this week from releasing Smith’s report until three days after the 11th Circuit had ruled. That means, barring further court intervention, the earliest Smith’s report could be made public would be Sunday.

But lawyers for Nauta and De Oliveira have since asked Cannon to extend her injunction and hold a hearing to consider more permanently halting the report’s release.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, called Cannon’s order “plainly erroneous” and urged both her and the 11th Circuit to lift it in court filings over the last two days.

Saturday evening, Cannon instructed lawyers for the government to provide detailed responses by Sunday morning to some of the specific concerns Nauta and De Oliveira have raised.