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Special counsel Jack Smith is dropping federal election subversion and mishandling of confidential documents cases against newly elected President Donald Trump, demanding the cases be dismissed in court on Monday.

Trump has said he would fire Smith as soon as he retakes office, breaking previous norms around investigations by special counsel.

“The Department of Justice’s position is that the Constitution requires that this case be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated,” Smith wrote in a six-page filing with U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., on the case of election subversion. . “This outcome is not based on the merits or strength of the case against the suspect.”

Smith’s criminal pursuit of Trump over the past two years for attempting to undermine the 2020 presidential election and his mishandling of classified documents represented an extraordinarily unique chapter in American history: never before has a former resident of the White House faced federal criminal charges persecution.

Although the election subversion case culminated this summer in a landmark Supreme Court ruling that found Trump enjoyed some presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, Trump’s strategy of delaying the case ensured that no trial ever got underway before the November election.

In the election lawsuit Trump faced in Washington DC, Smith accused the then-president of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss.

“The government’s position on the merits of prosecuting the suspect has not changed,” Smith said in the filing.

Chutkan had decided to what extent Trump’s conduct at the center of the case is protected by immunity, after prosecutors last month laid out their arguments for why the Supreme Court’s ruling should have no impact on the case. After Trump won reelection earlier this month, prosecutors asked Chutkan to suspend a series of post-election deadlines in the case while they weighed their next steps.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges in both cases.

Trump spokesman Steven Cheung called the move “a major victory for the rule of law” 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,” Cheung added.

As president, Trump will not have the power to interfere with the prosecutions brought against him by state authorities in Georgia and New York. However, the courts in those cases will still have to work out immunity questions and issues raised by his return to the White House.

Last week, the judge overseeing Trump’s criminal hush-money case in New York postponed his sentencing indefinitely. A jury in the state convicted Trump earlier this year on 34 charges of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment made during the 2016 campaign to adult film star Stormy Daniels, who alleged a previous affair with the president-elect. (Trump denies the affair.)

And Trump is still working to avoid prosecution in Georgia, where he is a defendant in a massive RICO case accusing him and several allies of seeking to overturn his 2020 election loss in the Peach State.

This story has been updated with additional information.