In Washington, the most dangerous weapon is not a missile. It is a signature. Quiet, administrative, almost boring until you understand what that signature can erase. A security clearance revoked. A contract frozen. A report buried. A prosecutor isolated. And if you have watched the American state long enough, you learn this lesson the hard way: when the executive branch decides to fight accountability, it rarely starts by arguing facts. It starts by cutting oxygen.
Over the last year, one story has repeatedly tried to force itself into the public bloodstream. The idea that a president can simply fire the prosecutor, kill the investigation, and walk away. It sounds like a thriller plot because it feels too crude for real life. But the verified record surrounding special counsel Jack Smith is more revealing and more unsettling, because it shows how power adapts when the obvious move is unavailable.
Jack Smith did not remain in office into Trump’s second term. According to CNBC and the Associated Press, Smith resigned from the Department of Justice on January 10, 2025, after submitting his confidential final report to Attorney General Merrick Garland on January 7, ten days before Trump’s inauguration. The two federal prosecutions Smith led did not proceed after Trump’s reelection. The Financial Times reported that Smith moved to dismiss the cases in line with the Justice Department’s long-standing position that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. That decision was institutional, not evidentiary. The evidence did not disappear. The machinery was instructed to stand down.
That policy is not folklore. It is doctrine. The Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel argued as early as 2000 that indicting or criminally prosecuting a sitting president would unconstitutionally undermine the executive branch’s ability to perform its functions. So if you are looking for a moment where a president fires a prosecutor, you will not find it here. Smith was already gone. And that is where the real story begins.
Because the inability to fire the special counsel did not end the conflict. It displaced it. Into a newer, quieter battlefield: retaliation infrastructure. On February 25, 2025, the White House issued a presidential memorandum directing federal agencies to suspend security clearances for a named attorney and other personnel at Covington & Burling who assisted Jack Smith, pending review, and to evaluate and terminate government contracts connected to the firm to the maximum extent permitted by law. Reuters described the move as part of a broader campaign against perceived adversaries. The significance of the action is not symbolic. It marks a shift from stopping prosecutions to punishing the ecosystem that makes prosecutions possible.
This is how modern power works. When you cannot legally remove the investigator, you target the support network. The lawyers. The firms. The contracts. The clearances. The professional oxygen. It is not only about vengeance. It is about deterrence. It tells every future lawyer, every future witness, every future public servant that involvement carries a cost. Make the room cold enough and fewer people will enter it.
This strategy aligns neatly with a legal philosophy that reemerged forcefully in 2025: unitary executive theory, the idea that the president must exercise sweeping control over the executive branch. As Cornell’s Legal Information Institute explains, the theory emphasizes presidential authority over executive officers. Reuters reported that Trump’s actions revived these arguments and set the stage for potential Supreme Court confrontations over the limits of executive power. The implication is stark. Accountability is reframed as insubordination, and insubordination is punished administratively.
This pattern has a historical echo that is impossible to ignore. In 1973, President Nixon ordered the firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. The attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned rather than comply, and Cox was ultimately dismissed, triggering public outrage and accelerating a constitutional crisis. Today’s version lacks the headline drama. There is no single explosive firing. Instead, there are clearance suspensions, contract reviews, narrative warfare, and quiet suffocation. Different tactics. Familiar objective.
Special counsel regulations were written precisely to prevent a prosecutor from being treated as disposable. Under 28 CFR Part 600, a special counsel may be removed only by the attorney general and only for good cause. Those rules protect the prosecutor. They do not automatically protect the ecosystem around the prosecutor once the investigation leaves government hands. That gap is where the new battlefield exists.
The courts have begun to push back. In late 2025, the Associated Press reported that a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to revoke attorney Mark Zaid’s security clearance, describing the action as political retaliation. The Washington Post documented a broader pattern of judicial skepticism toward efforts to punish lawyers and firms through clearance actions. This matters because it shows the system is not collapsing in a single direction. It is in conflict with itself. Executive power pushes outward. Judicial power pushes inward. That is what an institutional stress test looks like.\
This story matters even if you hate politics, because the rule of law is not a moral abstraction. It is an economic structure. Contracts assume enforceability. Markets assume predictability. Allies assume continuity. When legal advocacy becomes dangerous and enforcement becomes selective, uncertainty becomes measurable. Risk premiums rise. Capital hesitates. Projects pause. Hiring slows. Credit tightens. Ordinary people feel it not in headlines but in delayed raises, higher loan costs, and approvals that never come because agencies become politically risk-averse. This is the hidden tax of institutional conflict.
The deeper danger is not one action, but the governance culture being normalized. In a rule-of-law system, lawyers can represent unpopular clients without being treated as enemies of the state. In a loyalty-based system, legal representation itself becomes suspicious. When that line is crossed, accountability does not die because laws are repealed. It dies because institutions become afraid to enforce them.
The most corrosive element in this architecture is time. The Justice Department doctrine that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted creates an immunity window. Not immunity forever, but immunity now. In theory, it is a stabilizer meant to prevent paralysis of the executive branch. In practice, it becomes a tactical advantage. Delay turns into a governing strategy. While prosecution pauses, the executive can reshape the terrain, appoint loyalists, redirect enforcement, weaponize administrative tools, and intimidate the professional class that makes investigations possible.
That is the lesson of the Jack Smith arc. Not that a prosecutor was fired, but that accountability was narrowed while retaliation was widened. The White House memorandum of February 25, 2025 did not merely target individuals. It attempted to turn legal representation into a liability. It sent a message that proximity itself could be punished. And that message outlives any single lawsuit.
So the question many Americans keep asking is the wrong one. The question is not whether a president can fire a prosecutor. The more accurate question is whether a president can punish the legal ecosystem that dares to investigate him. In 2025, the answer appears to be that the attempt is underway. And that is how a democracy does not collapse overnight. It hollows out quietly, administratively, signature by signature.
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