In a detailed 174-page report published on Tuesday, former Special Counsel Jack Smith presented the first volume of his findings on the Department of Justice’s failed attempts to prosecute ex-President Donald Trump. Smith also justified the substantial expenses incurred and contentious decisions made during the inquiry.
The report reveals that Smith’s office spent over $36 million by March 2024 alone:
“$20 million from a permanent indefinite appropriation and an additional $16 million from other DOJ components.”
The total cost to taxpayers for the full investigation remains undisclosed.
Although the outcome of Trump’s election played a significant role in the decision to drop the charges, the legal landscape was made more intricate due to a pivotal ruling by the Supreme Court on presidential immunity. The court decreed that presidents enjoy “absolute immunity for core presidential conduct” and, at the very least, “presumptive immunity for other official acts.”
Smith’s report serves as an admission that his office considered this to be an unprecedented challenge:
Smith pointed out that historically, no court had ever ruled that Presidents are exempt from criminal accountability for their official actions. Moreover, he highlighted that the Constitution does not explicitly grant such immunity to the President.
Yet ultimately, the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling established rules for applying such immunity. The ruling signaled a significant shift in how potential presidential misconduct could be legally examined.
This forced Smith to reevaluate the evidence and reconstruct the indictment to focus only on non-immune conduct.
Trump’s Triumph
Trump’s legal team fired back in a scathing letter to Attorney General Garland.
Trump’s lawyers claimed that they:
“learned for the first time via private outreach from media sources, rather than Smith’s Office, that Smith is working on a report.”
They characterized this as part of a pattern, stating that Smith has engaged in:
“routinely leaking sensitive details regarding the actions of Smith’s Office to the media in violation of DOJ policy.”
Notably, the report draws a stark contrast with previous special counsel investigations. In their response letter to Attorney General Garland, Trump’s attorneys contrasted Smith’s approach with that of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
According to Trump’s legal team, Mueller believed that “fairness concerns counseled against” making public accusations without the opportunity for a trial, since:
“a prosecutor’s judgment that crimes were committed, but that no charges will be brought, affords no such adversarial opportunity for public name-clearing before an impartial adjudicator.”
The attorneys argued that Smith, unlike Mueller, chose to “construct the Draft Report as a partisan weapon” despite being unable to bring the cases to trial. Their letter argues that the report’s release violates the Presidential Transition Act during this sensitive period.
They called it:
“nothing more than a lawless political stunt, designed to politically harm President Trump and justify the huge sums of taxpayer money Smith unconstitutionally spent on his failed and dismissed cases.”
Smith defends his work until the very end, stating that:
“but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”
Trump’s attorneys condemned this assertion in their response letter, arguing that:
“releasing Smith’s report is obviously not in the public interest—particularly in light of President Trump’s commanding victory in the election and the sensitive nature of the ongoing transition process.”
Perhaps most telling is what the report doesn’t say.
It doesn’t explain why Smith’s team rushed to indict Trump during the presidential campaign. It doesn’t justify why they demanded impossibly quick trial dates that would have interfered with Trump’s campaign. And it doesn’t address why career prosecutors kept quitting the Special Counsel’s office as the cases fell apart.
The report stands as the final chapter in an unprecedented use of the justice system against a political opponent and a former U.S. president. The dismissal of both cases and Trump’s election victory appear to have rendered the final verdict.
