President-elect Donald Trump allegedly plans to fire special counsel Jack Smith’s entire team and have the DOJ investigate 2020 voter fraud.
Citing sources close to Trump, The Washington Post reported on Friday that Trump “plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith” and “assemble investigative teams within the Justice Department to hunt for evidence in battleground states that fraud tainted the 2020 election.”
Smith, meanwhile, has already announced his intention to retire from the DOJ before Inauguration Day:
Jack Smith reportedly plans to step down before Trump can fire him https://t.co/WMhsKWNSpI
— BPR (@BIZPACReview) November 13, 2024
Asked about the plan to fire Smith’s team, Trump’s transition press secretary initially seemed to confirm that the plan was real.
“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,” 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,” she added.
However, after the Post’s piece was published, Leavitt submitted another statement to the paper seemingly denying that the plan was real.
“President Trump and his transition team speaks for him, and anonymous sources not affiliated with him have no idea what they are talking about,” she said.
As for the Post’s sources, one of them doubled down, claiming the president-elect “wants to clean out ‘the bad guys, the people who went after me.'”
The source did admit though that the other idea of investigating 2020 voter fraud is “not at the top of the list,” with Trump’s primary focus being on de-swampifying the Department of Justice.
Trump himself admitted the latter in a Truth Social post published while announcing his pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi.
“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans,” he wrote in the post. “Not anymore. Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again.”
The bad news is that it could reportedly take years for Trump to fire some of the most deeply entrenched bureaucrats in the DOJ.
“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,” the Post notes.
But when current President Joe Biden took over, he reversed that order and finalized rules “bolstering protections for career staffers.”
Moving forward, Trump plans to reinstate Schedule F, which is good. The bad news is that the so-called legal experts the Post spoke to said it could take years to actually implement the rule as workers file appeals and the cases wind their way through court.
One “expert,” New York University law school professor Ryan Goodman, claimed on CNN this Friday that firing all of Smith’s team would “probably” be “illegal” and thus spark numerous legal challenges.
“These are civil servants who have legal protections,” he began. “They probably include people who did not have any choice but to work with the team. So to fire those people categorically who have protections … would be probably illegal firings. And a huge part of the Justice Department and Pam Bondi will be caught up in a huge amount of employment litigation over all of their claims were they to go down that path.
“So, it’s just very destructive. It smacks of political retribution. Even the idea that he’s announcing this, or it’s being reported that this is what he wants to do now before any kind of investigation into individuals, is another reason in which they’ll have very strong legal claims were they to try to do this,” he added.
Listen:
Regarding Trump’s concerns about the 2020 election, in September he published a Truth Social post claiming there was “rampant cheating” in the election and vowed that those responsible would “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.”
“Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials,” he wrote. “Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
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