The special counsel, Jack Smith, asked a federal judge in Washington on Monday to dismiss the indictment charging President-elect Donald J. Trump with plotting to subvert the 2020 election, bowing to a Justice Department policy that says it is unconstitutional to pursue prosecutions against sitting presidents.
Minutes after the filing in Washington, Mr. Smith made a similar filing to an appeals court in Atlanta, ending his attempts to reverse the dismissal of the other federal case against Mr. Trump. In that case, Mr. Trump stood accused of illegally holding on to classified documents after he left office. Prosecutors said they intend to pursue Mr. Trump’s two co-defendants in the documents case.
The moves by Mr. Smith were an acknowledgment that after an intensive investigation and two years of courtroom drama, prosecutors will not be able to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his efforts to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election, or for accusations that he illegally kept scores of classified documents at his Florida home after he left office.
In both of their filings, prosecutors cited a Justice Department policy that sitting presidents may not be prosecuted.
That policy, Mr. Smith wrote to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who handling the election case in Washington, “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.”
But as he sought dismissal of the cases before Mr. Trump is inaugurated, Mr. Smith did not definitively close the door on eventually prosecuting him. In both cases his requests were for dismissals “without prejudice,” leaving open the possibility that the charges might be refiled after Mr. Trump leaves office for the second time.
Tersely written and only six pages long, Mr. Smith’s filing to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan in Federal District Court in Washington effectively ended the Justice Department’s yearslong efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his attempts to cling to power after he was defeated by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.
That included spreading lies that there had been massive voter fraud and delivering an incendiary speech on Jan. 6, 2021, before a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to block Congress from certifying Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
Mr. Smith’s separate filing to the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which is weighing the fate of the documents case, referred to the Jan. 6 case filing and was even terser — but it was also more complicated.
That case has two other defendants — Mr. Trump’s employees Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira — and a Trump-appointed judge in Florida had already dismissed the indictment on the disputed grounds that Mr. Smith was unlawfully appointed.
Prosecutors had already challenged a decision this summer by Judge Aileen M. Cannon to throw out the documents case in a ruling that determined — against decades of legal precedent — that Mr. Smith had been unlawfully appointed to his job as special counsel.
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