Trump plans to fire Jack Smith's team, use DOJ to probe 2020 election
Special counsel Jack Smith, seen in June 2023, plans to resign and wrap up his federal prosecutions of Donald Trump before he takes office. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition.
Trump is also planning to assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election, one of the people said.
The proposals offer new evidence that Trump’s intention to dramatically shake up the status quo in Washington is likely to focus heavily on the Justice Department, the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, and that at least some of his agenda is fueled not by ideology or policy goals but personal grievance.
Asked about Trump’s plans to fire prosecutors on Smith’s team and investigate the 2020 election, a Trump spokeswoman echoed the president-elect’s frequent claim that the Justice Department cases against him were politically motivated.
“President Trump campaigned on firing rogue bureaucrats who have engaged in the illegal weaponization of our American justice system, and the American people can expect he will deliver on that promise,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “One of the many reasons that President Trump won the election in a landslide is Americans are sick and tired of seeing their tax dollars spent on targeting the Biden-Harris Administration’s political enemies rather than going after real violent criminals in our streets.”
Later Friday evening, Trump’s team sent another statement from Leavitt: “President Trump and his transition team speaks for him, and anonymous sources not affiliated with him have no idea what they are talking about,” it said.
Trump still speaks frequently about the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden but continues to insist was stolen from him in key battlegrounds. And he has maintained from the start that Smith’s investigations into his efforts to reverse his defeat - as well as his alleged mishandling of classified documents after he left the White House - are examples of the weaponization of government against him that must be avenged.
As he again becomes president, Trump “wants to clean out ‘the bad guys, the people who went after me,’” said one of the individuals familiar with the plans, who like the other person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations about the incoming Trump administration.
The person noted that the idea of assembling investigative teams of federal agents and prosecutors in battleground states is less well-formed and “not at the top of the list” - unlike the president-elect’s oft-proclaimed desire to clean house at the Justice Department. Trump reiterated that goal Thursday, after his first pick for attorney general, former congressman Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration.
“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans,” Trump wrote when announcing his new pick, longtime ally Pam Bondi, in a post on Truth Social. “Not anymore. Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again.”
It’s not clear how quickly or easily Trump could fire career staff, including the prosecutors who worked for Smith on the classified-documents and election-obstruction cases. Appeals on several fronts delayed the cases from going to trial before the November election, and Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting sitting presidents. Smith is expected to submit court filings in both cases Dec. 2 explaining how he plans to wind them down.
Before Trump left office in 2021, he passed an executive order known as the “Schedule F” rule, which would have reclassified huge swaths of career government employees and made it easier to fire them. Biden reversed that order when he entered the White House, and his administration finalized rules through the Office of Personnel Management bolstering protections for career staffers.
Trump has vowed to reinstate the Schedule F rule, however. Even if he succeeds, legal experts said it could take years to implement the new rule, as the untested issue of firing masses of federal workers makes its way through the courts.
“The protections that Biden put in will help, but it will be a fight,” said Rushab Sanghvi, acting general counsel of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents some Justice Department employees - though not prosecutors.
Smith’s office is composed of dozens of attorneys, FBI agents and support staff from throughout the Justice Department, many with specialties in national security and public corruption cases. Some are former Justice Department employees plucked from private practice. Most, however, are mid- and upper-level career staffers on detail to the special counsel’s team from divisions within the main Justice Department building in downtown Washington or from U.S. attorneys’ offices throughout the country.
In past special counsel investigations, such staff attorneys typically have returned to their regular jobs after their temporary assignments concluded. Some members of Smith’s teams have already done that. In other cases, departments that loaned employees have not yet been informed when or whether they will return, according to a person familiar with the situation, who like others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.
Plans for federal election-fraud investigations in swing states are less well-defined, but several officials who defended the 2020 voting in key battlegrounds said they have been bracing for the possibility.
“Since there’s no malfeasance, we will certainly work with anyone who wants to investigate our work,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D). “But we will expect them to act with integrity and go where the facts - not their agendas - will lead.”
Trump has continued to trumpet his allegations about 2020, using ominous language to suggest that he would try to criminally prosecute state officials. But neither the president-elect nor his allies have ever provided evidence to prove their claims of voter fraud, and they did not make similar claims during this month’s election after Trump emerged as the victor.
In September, he claimed without evidence in a social media post that there was “rampant cheating” in 2020 and promised that those responsible would “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.”
“Please beware,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Among the accusations Trump and his allies have lobbed at Benson and others: They allowed the counting of ballots from noncitizens, dead people or out-of-state residents; they illegally altered election rules during the coronavirus pandemic that allowed cheating to occur; and they barred GOP poll watchers from observing the voting or counting.
One individual close to Trump’s transition effort who had heard of the possibility that the new administration would investigate alleged 2020 fraud said it’s possible such an effort could be led by Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys in the battleground states. But it could also be assigned to a task force or special counsel.
What’s clear is that the effort would reside within the Justice Department. And the incoming president’s selections so far to lead that law-enforcement agency are loyalists: either people like Bondi or Gaetz who stood by him unwaveringly, even after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, or personal attorneys who have helped defend him against criminal charges.
Bondi is a former Florida attorney general who worked in the Trump White House during the first administration. To fill out the rest of the top Justice Department leadership, Trump has said he will install three attorneys who represented him in the federal cases brought by Smith but also his state prosecution in New York, in which Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush money payment ahead of the 2016 election.
The president-elect announced he would nominate Todd Blanche to be the deputy attorney general, the second-most-powerful position at the Justice Department. Emil Bove, another defense attorney, would be the principal deputy attorney general. And Trump has said he would nominate D. John Sauer, who argued his landmark presidential immunity case in front of the Supreme Court, to be the nation’s solicitor general.
Trump likely won’t get the chance to carry out one act of retribution he has promised: firing Smith. The longtime federal prosecutor, who also worked for several years at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, plans to resign as special counsel and wrap up his federal prosecutions of Trump before he can be ousted, The Post reported this month.
