By “I could have been a contender.”
That’s what Jack Smith effectively wrote in his final report. Biden’s special counsel appointed to take out his top competition passionately defended his decision to prosecute President-elect Donald Trump over alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results earlier in the week. Smith’s report, issued shortly before his resignation from the Department of Justice, emphasized his commitment to upholding the rule of law and the integrity of his investigative team.
“Special counsel Jack Smith’s final report, released shortly before 1 a.m. Tuesday, offers a robust defense of his two-year, ultimately stymied effort to prosecute Donald Trump for his alleged attempts to subvert the results of the 2020 election,” wrote The Washington Post.
“While much of the evidence described in the report’s 137 pages was previously revealed in legal filings and court hearings, the document offers the fullest public accounting of Smith’s attempt to prosecute what he calls an ‘unprecedented criminal effort.’ It also gives new insights into the special counsel’s investigative process, challenges his team faced in building their case, and the reasoning that guided their decisions.
Trump dismissed the report in a post on his social media platform Truth Social shortly after its release, calling Smith ‘a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election.’”
Jack Smith’s life has been dominated over the past couple of years with stopping Trump from retaking the White House. In a separate case, he charged the former president over alleged mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. However, the case was dismissed in July 2024 by Judge Aileen Cannon, who ruled the appointment of a special counsel unconstitutional.
Reflecting on his tenure, Smith stood by his prosecutorial decisions, stating, “To have done otherwise on the facts developed during our work would have been to shirk my duties as a prosecutor and a public servant.”
Smith asserted that prosecuting Trump was not only justified but necessary, declaring that “no man in this country is so high that he is above the law.” He cited historical figures such as John Adams and former Attorney General Edward Levi to underscore the principle of accountability in a democracy. “Our work rested upon the fundamental value of our democracy that we exist as ‘a government of laws, and not of men,’” Smith wrote, quoting Adams.
The former special counsel’s introductory letter to the report drew particular attention for its unusually personal tone, said one eagled-eyed legal commentator, noted The Daily Caller.
CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig described it as “an intense, almost emotional defense” of Smith’s team. Honig noted that while it’s customary for special counsels to acknowledge their team’s efforts, Smith went further, quoting historical figures and directly addressing criticism of his team’s integrity.
“This is an important and necessary example of Jack Smith standing up for his team,” Honig remarked. “But it’s hard to read that and think that everything that follows is completely separate from emotion.”
Smith’s resignation marks the end of a high-profile chapter in the DOJ’s efforts to address allegations of misconduct at the highest levels of government, leaving a legacy that will likely remain a point of debate in the legal and political arenas.
Despite being a liberal, Honig has been a major critic of the Democratic lawfare against Trump. In an op-ed for New York Magazine, he criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against former President Donald Trump as an “ill-conceived, unjustified mess.”
Honig, who previously served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued the charges were unprecedented and inflated, accusing Bragg of contorting legal boundaries to pursue Trump. The charges primarily centered on falsification of business records, a crime that typically constitutes a misdemeanor in New York. However, Bragg elevated them to felonies by alleging they were committed with intent to violate election laws—an approach Honig described as legally obscure and procedurally flawed.
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