In a closing argument he never got to make to a jury, Jack Smith, the former special counsel who investigated Donald J. Trump, insisted that his thwarted prosecution was righteous and that his investigators set an example “for others to fight for justice.”
“While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters,” Mr. Smith wrote in a final report issued in the middle of the night, while much of the country was asleep.
But the culmination of his work may have in fact had the opposite effect. Given the rulings that went against him by courts that Mr. Trump helped shape, Mr. Smith departs the most important prosecutorial job in the country over the past two years with the unintended consequence of giving Mr. Trump and every future president more, not less, freedom from legal constraints.
And the Justice Department, whose principles Mr. Smith fiercely defended in his last hours as special counsel, now enters a second Trump administration with less authority to pursue a president than it has had in half a century, after a sweeping Supreme Court decision that granted presidents broad immunity….