Washington (AP)In the midst of legal disputes over how much of his investigative report on President-elect Donald Trump can be made public in the coming days, special counsel Jack Smith has resigned from the Justice Department.
In a court filing on Saturday, the department announced Smith’s resignation, stating that he had resigned the day before. Ten days prior to Trump’s inauguration, the resignation comes after two failed criminal charges against Trump were dropped after Trump won the White House in November.
Smith and his team wrote a two-volume report on their dual investigations into Trump’s attempts to change the results of his 2020 election and his hoarding of classified papers at his Mar-a-Lago home. The report’s destiny is currently in question.
The judge who presided over the case involving classified materials, who was selected by Trump, accepted a defense plea to at least temporarily stop the release of the document, which the Justice Department had been anticipated to make public in the final days of the Biden administration. The Trump legal team joined Trump valet Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira, two of Trump’s co-defendants in that case, in arguing that the report’s dissemination would be unjustly prejudicial.
In response, the department stated that as long as criminal charges against Nauta and De Oliveira are still pending, it would not make the number of classified material publicly available. The case was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon last July, but the Smith team’s appeal of that ruling regarding the two co-defendants was still pending.
Prosecutors, however, stated that they planned to move forward with the election meddling volume release.
Late Friday, they filed an emergency request asking the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta to quickly withdraw a Cannon injunction that prevented them from making any part of the study public. On Saturday, they separately informed Cannon that she lacked the power to stop the report’s publication. In response, she issued an order instructing prosecutors to submit a follow-up brief by Sunday.
An emergency defense attempt to prevent the publishing of the election interference report—which details Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results prior to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021—was rejected by the appeals court on Thursday night. However, it maintained Cannon’s injunction, which said that no conclusions could be made public until three days following the appeals court’s decision.
In its emergency move, the Justice Department informed the appeals court that Cannon’s order was obviously incorrect.
According to the Justice Department, the Attorney General is the Senate-confirmed head of the Department of Justice and has the power to oversee all of the Department’s officers and staff. Therefore, the Attorney General has the power to determine whether to make public an investigative report that was written by his staff.
Special counsels are required by Justice Department regulations to provide reports at the end of their work, and regardless of the topic, it is common practice for these records to be made public.
A special counsel report that looked into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and possible connections to the Trump campaign was issued by William Barr, the attorney general during Trump’s first term.
Additionally, special counsel reports concerning Biden’s handling of classified material prior to Biden’s election as president have been made public by Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland.