Special counsel Jack Smith on Monday filed motions to drop all federal charges against President-elect Donald Trump regarding his mishandling of classified documents and his effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the lead-up to the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S Capitol.
Hours later, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan granted Smith's motion to dismiss the Jan. 6-related indictment, formally bringing to an end the case that alleged Trump unlawfully conspired to overturn his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden.
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Trump was first indicted in June 2023 in a federal court in Miami on 37 felony counts related to mishandling classified documents that he took from the White House to his Florida home. They included willful retention of national defense information, making false statements, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. A Florida judge dismissed the case, but Smith's office had sought an appeal.
Trump was separately indicted on four felonies in August 2023 for his attempt to reverse the 2020 election results: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights.
The case was then put on hold for months as Trump’s team argued that the case should be thrown out for multiple reasons, including that a former president cannot be prosecuted for his actions in office.
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Trump has claimed that the prosecutions were politically motivated. He has never publicly conceded that his election claims were, in fact, false, and he pleaded not guilty in both federal cases.
The federal indictments of Trump marked an extraordinary moment in American history — the first-ever accusation that a president sought illegally to cling to power, mishandled classified information and attempted to obstruct a federal investigation.
Their dismissal also marks a historic moment. Fifty years after lawmakers from both parties forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency amid allegations of criminal conduct in office, half of American voters chose to return Trump to the presidency.
Trump's election victory means that the Justice Department’s longstanding position that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime will apply to Trump after he takes office on Jan. 20.
"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," Smith’s office wrote in Monday’s filing.
“The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed. But the circumstances have," the special counsel added.
The DOJ policy, which was adopted during the Watergate scandal, notes that Congress has the power to impeach a president if they commit crimes. It is designed to allow sitting presidents to perform their duties without being hindered by legal cases.
That legal position from DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel is the same one that helped Trump avoid being charged in connection with Robert Mueller’s special counsel probe during Trump’s first presidency. Mueller’s team decided that they could not reach a final conclusion on whether they believed Trump committed a crime, since they could not charge a sitting president.
Charging Trump was “not an option we could consider,” Mueller explained in 2019. Now the same OLC opinion is preventing Smith’s case from going forward.
Following Trump’s re-election, the special counsel’s office was caught between “two fundamental and compelling national interests,” Smith’s team wrote. “On the one hand, the Constitution’s requirement that the President must not be unduly encumbered in fulfilling his weighty responsibilities ... and on the other hand, the Nation’s commitment to the rule of law and the longstanding principle that “[n]o man in this country is so high that he is above the law.”
Smith and his team plan to resign before Trump takes office, one source told NBC News earlier this month. Special counsel regulations require Smith to file a report to the attorney general explaining his charging decisions before he steps down.
Key help from conservative judges
Conservative judges on the Supreme Court handed Trump a sweeping victory in the case with its ruling on presidential immunity. The justices first took months to issue a decision, making it impossible for the federal judge in Washington overseeing the case, Chutkan, to conduct a trial before the election.
In a July ruling, they gave the president sweeping new immunity from prosecution, finding that all of a president's interactions with the attorney general were "absolutely immune" from prosecution. In a dissenting opinion, liberal justices argued that the ruling gave presidents the power to order federal criminal investigations of their rivals without legal consequences.
Two weeks later, the Trump-appointed federal judge overseeing the classified documents case, Aileen Cannon, threw out all of the charges against Trump accusing him of mishandling classified documents and attempting to obstruct the investigation.
In a decision that legal experts widely criticized and that Smith vowed to appeal, Cannon found that Smith had not been properly appointed as a special counsel. The surprise ruling reversed decades of past rulings by both liberal and conservative judges.
In August, a new federal grand jury indicted Trump on the same four charges in the election case, alleging that Trump’s false claims about mass voter fraud during the 2020 election were “unsupported, objectively unreasonable, and ever-changing” and that Trump “knew that they were false.” But Trump's re-election ended Smith's ability to move forward with those charges.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement, “Today’s decision by the DOJ ends the unconstitutional federal cases against President Trump, and is a major victory for the rule of law. The American People and President Trump want an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and we look forward to uniting our country.”
Many Jan. 6 defendants have told judges they lament that they were "gullible" enough to fall for Trump's falsehoods, which were echoed by the president-elect's allies, Republicans in Congress and conservative influencers on social media.
The Justice Department is focused on arresting the "most egregious" rioters before Trump returns to office. The president-elect has said he will pardon some undetermined portion of Jan. 6 rioters, whom he’s called “warriors,” “unbelievable patriots,” political prisoners and “hostages.”
He is expected to walk through the lower west tunnel, where some of the worst violence of Jan. 6 took place, to be sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2025.
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