Jack Smith arrived in Washington almost two years ago with expectations that his assignment to investigate Donald J. Trump would be profoundly consequential. But instead of leaving his post on the heels of a courtroom victory, he is departing after a defeat determined largely at the ballot box.
Mr. Smith filed two federal indictments against Mr. Trump, the first ever against a former president. His plans for getting the cases in front of juries, already complicated by adverse court rulings, were wiped away by Mr. Trump’s triumph on Election Day. The Justice Department has a longstanding policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
The legacy of Mr. Smith’s investigation is shaping up to be a complex one. Legal experts give him credit for running a tightly disciplined investigation and amassing considerable evidence to back the charges he lodged.
But legal battles that spun out of his prosecutions have left the Justice Department with what appear to be considerable new constraints on holding presidents accountable. And for all Mr. Smith’s efforts to avoid having his work enmeshed in politics, Mr. Trump essentially put the voters between himself and federal prosecutors.
Mr. Smith made clear in a pair of court filings on Monday that he still believed in the validity of the evidence he had gathered, and the righteousness of the charges he had filed. He plans to leave the Justice Department before Mr. Trump is sworn in as president, according to people familiar with his plans, presumably after filing a final report on his work.
But while the cases he brought laid out detailed evidence against Mr. Trump — alleging that he mishandled classified documents, then alleging that he conspired to reverse the 2020 election results — they are likely to be remembered just as much for their unintended consequences.
In a proceeding stemming from the charges that Mr. Trump had plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents enjoy considerable immunity from prosecution for official actions they took in office.
And in a stunning ruling in the case accusing Mr. Trump of mishandling national security secrets after leaving office, a federal judge appointed by Mr. Trump ruled that Mr. Smith’s installation as a special counsel was invalid, saying it violated the constitution.
Samuel Buell, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at Duke University, said that prosecutors have to act on what they believe to be the law at the time, not on the potential for their own actions to lead to changes in the law. Still, Mr. Buell cautioned, the results of Mr. Smith’s two cases were surely not what the special counsel had hoped for or expected.
“There’s a cliché that applies here,” Mr. Buell said. “If you’re going to shoot at the king, don’t miss. When you go for a very challenging, novel kind of case, whether it’s on the legal theories or on the question of who to target, failing can sometimes make things worse off than if you haven’t tried at all.”
Roslynn R. Mauskopf, a former prosecutor and judge who once supervised Mr. Smith when she was the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, said his principles were formed under the direction of the longest-serving district attorney in Manhattan’s history.
“All of us who were trained as prosecutors by the legendary Bob Morgenthau,” she said, “were guided by a fundamental principle — it’s about doing the right thing, following the facts without fear or favor wherever and to whomever they may lead, and even if they lead nowhere or if you end up losing a case, justice has still been done.”
A tight-lipped exercise fanatic, Mr. Smith said little in public during his time as special counsel, abiding by the prosecutor’s mantra of speaking through the court filings, of which there were many.
Around Washington, he was more likely to be spotted at a Subway sandwich shop than in front of microphones. But wherever he went he was guarded by a phalanx of federal agents, the most overt sign of the intense security concerns that surrounded his work from the beginning.
Right-wing influencers focused on his wife, a filmmaker who produced “Becoming,” a documentary about Michelle Obama, arguing that it showed a familial liberal bias.
Then there was a string of verbal attacks by Mr. Trump, who called Mr. Smith “deranged” and in charge of a team of “thugs” and “sleazebags.” While hardly the first indicted politician to excoriate his prosecutor, Mr. Trump did so with a singular vehemence and an incomparable fan base.
As Mr. Smith prepares to file a final report, he knows Mr. Trump’s legion of loyalists will keep after him. The prosecution team is likely to face some manner of investigation — first from congressional Republicans, but then possibly from the Justice Department’s inspector general.
Some Trump advisers, including Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, who was a potential witness in the documents case, have already called for a criminal investigation of Mr. Smith, without articulating specific criminal conduct.
“Jack Smith and his office must face severe legal, political, and financial consequences for their blatant lawfare and election interference,” Mike Davis, a Trump ally who worked for Senate Republicans, wrote on social media. Mr. Davis called for Mr. Smith to be prosecuted.
Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, made the case — echoed by other Trump allies in recent days — that the withdrawal of the charges was “tantamount to an admission that this was just politicized lawfare from the beginning.”
Current and former Justice Department officials say it is the opposite.
“Jack Smith is dismissing this case because he has respect for the rule of law, and he’s proving that by following D.O.J.’s guidance,” said Jeffrey M. Cohen, an associate professor of the practice at Boston College Law School and a former federal prosecutor.
“What he’s doing is the exact opposite of lawfare — lawfare is having no respect for the rule of law,” he added.
On Tuesday, a federal appeals panel granted Mr. Smith’s request to dismiss Mr. Trump from the fight over the documents case. The prosecutor has not abandoned every element of that case, however. He has filed a separate brief as he continues to press the appeal related to Mr. Trump’s two co-defendants, who are not covered by presidential immunity.
And in shutting down his case, Mr. Smith sought to set some meager precedents that may help future special counsels. He suggested that Congress could decide that time served as president does not count against the statute of limitations for federal charges, which in theory could be refiled after a president leaves office.
But anyone appointed to such a job in the future has a tougher investigative and prosecutorial standard to meet. And future elected officials facing legal troubles will no doubt keep in mind Mr. Trump’s success in fighting indictments with politics.
At an early stage of the election obstruction case, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the Federal District Court in Washington declared trials “are not like elections to be won through the use of the meeting hall, the radio and the newspaper,” quoting from a World War II-era Supreme Court decision.
“This case,” she insisted, “is no exception.”
But it was.
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