Former Trump White House attorney Ty Cobb said Monday that President-elect Trump and his allies don’t have a “legitimate way” of going after special counsel Jack Smith’s team.
The comments came hours after Smith announced that he is seeking dismissal of Trump’s election subversion and classified documents cases based on the long-standing view that a sitting president cannot be criminally prosecuted while in office.
“They have vowed certainly he has vowed and others, you know, involved in the transition team have vowed vengeance with regard to the prosecutors and…the agents. Of course, they didn’t do anything wrong, and there’s really nothing to pursue them about,” Cobb told CNN’s Erin Burnett.
Cobb added that he thinks that Trump has a “palpable conflict of interest,” which means they would likely be entitled to a special counsel.
“I don’t think there’s a legitimate way to pursue these people on the facts or the law or without an independent counsel,” Cobb said.
Trump and some of his allies, including his new attorney general pick Pam Bondi, have called for an investigation of prosecutors involved in Smith’s cases.
“The Department of Justice — the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Bondi said during a 2023 appearance on Fox News.
“The investigators will be investigated because the deep state, last term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows. But now they have a spotlight on them, and they can all be investigated,” she added.
The decision also follows a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that core presidential powers are immune from prosecution.
The Washington Post earlier this week reported that Trump plans to fire “the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president.”
Even with Smith’s move to dismiss the federal cases, Trump still faces two other cases. First is the New York hush money case, where he was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a payment made to a porn actor during the 2016 election to buy her silence over an alleged affair. The case is in limbo after Trump won the election earlier this month; sentencing has been paused until after his second term concludes.
His other case focuses on efforts by Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia specifically. It has yet to begin due to pretrial wrangling, as Trump’s team has sought to force the removal of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) — who brought the case against him — over allegations of misconduct.
