In June, the US Supreme Court held that current and former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for their official actions, casting doubt on the election-interference case.
Then, in July, the judge overseeing the documents case dismissed those charges, ruling that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was invalid because it was not approved by Congress – a requirement that had not been applied to previous investigations.
Smith pressed on, retooling his election-interference indictment and appealing against the document-case dismissal. But the timeline for any trials had disappeared over the horizon.
And with Trump’s election victory – and the near certainty that his administration would drop the cases once they took power – the final resolution was all but inevitable.
Smith’s decision to abandon the prosecutions amounted to little more than an early mercy killing – one that was quickly celebrated by the Trump team.
“Today’s decision by the DoJ ends the unconstitutional federal cases against President Trump and is a ,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung wrote in a statement.
“The American people and President Trump want an immediate end to the political weaponisation of our justice system, and we look forward to uniting our country.”
There is still the possibility that Trump will be sentenced in his New York criminal conviction for hush-money payments earlier this year, but his lawyers are pressing for that case to be thrown out.
The sprawling multi-party indictments for election interference in Georgia is not affected by Smith’s decision, but it currently exists in legal limbo amidst efforts to remove Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis from the case. Neither at the moment appears to present a serious legal threat to the incoming president.
Smith has promised to continue his appeal of prosecutions of Trump’s associates in the documents case, but Trump could end that upon taking office in January with the flick of his pardoning pen.
After years of living in legal jeopardy, Trump’s election victory appears to have all but wiped away those concerns, leaving four years to focus on governing and implementing his agenda. It is perhaps the most immediate and tangible consequence of his return to the apex of political power.
More than a year of work by dozens of government lawyers, including hundreds of interviews and subpoenas and millions of dollars spent, has ended not with the bang of a gavel, but with the click of an electronic court filing.