Dem
47
GOP
53
It wasn't exactly news, since Jack Smith had already announced that he was going to resign from the Department of Justice before Jan. 20, but he resigned on Friday. Still, it was newsworthy enough to make the news as far away as Ukraine. He was hoping to go out in a blaze of glory with Trump in prison. Instead he went out in a footnote to his final filing saying that he was separated from the DoJ on January 10.
It wasn't for lack of trying. Smith gave it his all. He did everything by the books, which slowed down the process of handling his two cases, one about the coup attempt in D.C. and one about the stolen documents in convicted felon Donald Trump's bathroom in Florida. He had ironclad evidence of lawbreaking in both cases, but ran into bad luck in both of them. In the coup attempt case, the Supreme Court ruled that a president is kind of like a king and can't be prosecuted for doing things related to his job. In itself, that might not have killed the case, but it certainly slowed it down. If Kamala Harris had won the election, Smith would have just plodded along and probably gotten a conviction, however long it took. In the documents case, Judge Aileen Cannon just decided on her own that the special prosecutor law is unconstitutional, even though no other judge thought so in the 50 years it has been around. Smith was unlucky to have drawn a Trump-appointed judge who decided on day 1 to do everything she could to help Trump in the hopes he would later promote her.
Now the tables are turned and Trump might well ask his new AG-designate, Pam Bondi, to prosecute Smith. That could be interesting in itself. Bondi acts like a big Trump fan, but she was also attorney general of Florida and knows the rules. Will she be willing to do something that she knows is unethical and possibly illegal (i.e., indict someone she knows very well has not committed any crime)? As a general rule, the DoJ does not like to bring cases unless it thinks there is a greater than 95% chance of getting a conviction from a jury. She might try to stall by saying she is working hard to collect evidence so she can get a conviction and keep Trump on the line for years until he forgets about the whole thing. If she does bring a case, that would be an opportunity for Smith to display all the evidence he has against Trump to show that he was following the law because there was solid evidence of crimes Trump committed. That might not work out well for Trump, but he never thinks things through. (V)