A judge Monday dismissed the charges against Donald Trump related to the Jan. 6 riots after Special Counsel Jack Smith threw in the towel — with the president-elect bashing the case as solely “political hijacking.”
Presiding US District Judge Tanya Chutkan of Washington, DC, granted Smith’s motion filed earlier Monday seeking to dismiss the charges based on Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election and the precedent against indicting a sitting US president.
Smith’s team also separately moved Monday to end its appeal of a Florida judge’s decision nixing Smith’s classified document case against Trump — once considered one of the strongest in a slew of legal indictments against the Republican.
“These cases, like all of the other cases I have been forced to go through, are empty and lawless, and should never have been brought,” Trump vented on Truth Social on Monday afternoon.
“Over $100 Million Dollars of Taxpayer Dollars has been wasted in the Democrat Party’s fight against their Political Opponent, ME. Nothing like this has ever happened in our Country before.”
Trump added that he had “persevered, against all odds, and WON” against the “political hijacking,” which he decried as a “low point in the History of our Country.”
Chutkan noted in her swift decision that “when a prosecutor moves to dismiss an indictment without prejudice, ‘there is a strong presumption in favor’ of that course.”
Smith’s team, in moving to dismiss the charges it brought against Trump for alleged 2020 election subversion efforts Jan. 6, 2020, wrote in court papers Monday, “It has long been the position of the Department of Justice that the United States Constitution forbids the federal indictment and subsequent criminal prosecution of a sitting President.
“The Department’s position is that the Constitution requires that this case be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated,” the document said. “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the defendant.”
Trump, 78, had been charged with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy against rights and conspiracy to defraud the United States in the case. He was the first former or sitting US president to be criminally charged with anything.
“Today’s decision by the DOJ ends the unconstitutional federal cases against President Trump, and is a major victory for the rule of law,” Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, said in a statement.
“The American People and President Trump want an immediate end to the political weaponization of our justice system and we look forward to uniting our country.”
Vice President-elect JD Vance similarly took a victory lap over the development, positing that if Trump lost the election, “he may very well have spent the rest of his life in prison.
“These prosecutions were always political. Now it’s time to ensure what happened to President Trump never happens in this country again,” Vance added on X.
Smith had reportedly been working to wind down his cases against Trump — and step down before the former president gets sworn back into office on Jan. 20, 2025, and likely fires him.
Chutkan previously agreed to put the Jan. 6 case on pause days after the Nov. 5 election in light of Trump’s victory.
In late 2022, after Trump’s 2024 campaign launch, Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Smith to oversee the Justice Department’s two main investigations of Trump regarding his 2020 election machinations and alleged hoarding of classified documents.
A Jan. 6 election-subversion indictment against Trump was handed down in August 2023.
Since then, Trump’s legal team had seemingly endeavored to delay the case as much as possible, knowing that his winning back the White House would give him more tools to quash the case.
This included an effort to appeal the case based on claims of presidential immunity, a challenge that stalled the case from December of last year through this past August and went to the US Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court determined a president has “absolute” immunity for official actions taken in office, although it did not specify whether Trump’s actions were covered by what it called “official acts.”
In August, Smith then unfurled a superseding indictment that revamped his legal justifications for the charges in response to the high court’s ruling.
Smith also had separately charged Trump with 40 criminal counts related to his retention of highly classified documents after his White House departure in 2021.
That case, widely seen by legal experts as one of the strongest indictments against him, was tossed out by a judge in July. Smith’s team had been exploring avenues to revive that case as well before the election.
Then Monday, Smith’s team also filed its motion to dismiss its appeal of the Florida judge’s decision to nix the classified document case.
Trump had also been hit with two other indictments by state prosecutors — the 34-count Manhattan hush-money case and the 10-count Georgia 2020 election-tampering case.
He was convicted in the Manhattan case, but Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan has indefinitely postponed his sentencing — and suggested he may toss the case out altogether — because of Trump’s presidential win.
Meanwhile, the Georgia case is bogged down in litigation over issues raised against Democratic Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all of the charges against him — which once totaled 91 at their peak — and accused prosecutors of mounting a “witch hunt” against him.
Now that he is poised to roar back into the Oval Office, Trump has hinted that he will contemplate whether to flex his pardon power against some of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol rioters who had stormed Congress.
