Special Counsel Jack Smith has officially resigned from his job at the Department of Justice.
He made the announcement on Friday after two investigations into President-elect Donald Trump in which he brought two cases that were both ended after Trump won the election, The New York Times reported.
In a footnote in a motion that he handed to US District Judge Aileen Cannon on Saturday, he said that his work was done and he was no longer with the Department of Justice as of January 10.
The motion asked the judge not to extend a court order blocking the release of his report.
“The Special Counsel completed his work and submitted his final confidential report on January 7, 2025, and separated from the Department on January 10,” the footnote said.
“Mr. Smith’s resignation left unfinished one last step in the more than two-year odyssey he undertook by investigating and ultimately bringing charges against Mr. Trump: the release of a two-volume report detailing his decision-making in both criminal cases,” The Times said.
“Mr. Trump’s lawyers and lawyers for his two co-defendants in the documents case have been fighting fiercely for the past week to stop the release of both volumes. In court papers, they have assailed the report as a ‘one-sided’ and ‘unlawful’ political attack against the president-elect and complained it unfairly implicates some unnamed “anticipated” members of his incoming administration,” the report said.
“The report amounts to Mr. Smith’s valedictory word on the work he started when he was first appointed in November 2022, shortly after Mr. Trump announced he was running again for president. It contains his explanations of why he brought the charges he did in the two cases as well as his legal reasoning for not bringing other charges,” it said.
A federal appeals court turned down a request to keep part of Smith’s final report from going public. The report includes details of Smith’s investigation and prosecution of Trump’s alleged interference in the 2020 election and supposed improper retention of classified records.
Walt Nauta, a Trump aide, and Carlos de Oliveira, a former property manager at Mar-a-Lago, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to deny their request. They were charged with blocking a separate federal investigation into Trump’s handling of sensitive government records.
The court told the DOJ that they couldn’t release the report for three days, Fox News reported.
The Justice Department said it would go ahead with its plans to release the first of two volumes about the election interference case. However, the classified documents part of the report would only be available to the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to look over in private as long as the case against Trump’s co-defendants is still going on.
It wasn’t clear right away when the report on election interference would be made public.
In a decision about presidential immunity, the Supreme Court said that former presidents are generally not prosecutable. This made the case of election interference less broad.
After Trump won the election, Smith’s team dropped both cases in November, saying that it was against Justice Department policy to bring federal charges against a sitting president.
Special counsels appointed by the attorney general are required by Justice Department rules to turn in a secret report when their investigations are over. After that, the attorney general will choose what to release to the public.
Attorney General Merrick Garland has made public in full the reports that the special counsels who worked for him wrote. These include Robert Hur’s report on how President Joe Biden handled classified information and John Durham’s report on the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.