Donald Trump said on Thursday he would order the immediate firing of the special counsel Jack Smith if he were re-elected in the November election in the clearest expression of his intent to shut down the two criminal cases brought against him.
The remarks from Trump, who remains in a tight race for the presidency against Kamala Harris with 12 days until the election, came in a conversation with the conservative podcast host Hugh Hewitt, who asked whether Trump would pardon himself or fire the special counsel.
“Oh, it’s so easy. It’s so easy ... I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said of Smith, who last year charged the former president in Florida over his retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago club, and in Washington over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump also said in the interview that he had been given immunity from the US supreme court, a reference to its ruling earlier this year that found former presidents are immune from prosecution for official actions related to the office of the presidency.
The power to fire the special counsel formally rests with the attorney general, but Trump has made no secret of his intention to appoint a loyalist as attorney general who would agree to withdraw the justice department from the two pending criminal cases.
Trump has previously tried to fire prosecutors who have investigated him personally. During his first term, he repeatedly tried to fire the special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated Trump’s ties to Russian interference in the 2020 election.
He ultimately backed off after the White House counsel, Don McGahn, disagreed with Trump’s attempts to fire Mueller and threatened to quit if Trump continued to press ahead with his order to shut down the Mueller investigation.
Multiple current and former Trump advisers have suggested there would be no such hurdles in a second term. Trump, the advisers said, would simply call his loyalist attorney general to involve himself at the justice department as he wished, without pushback from career officials.
Howard Lutnick, co-chair of Trump’s transition team and the Cantor Fitzgerald chief executive, has repeatedly said anyone who wanted to join the second Trump administration – at the justice department or elsewhere – would need to be personally loyal to him.
“This concept of doing what you want to do because I don’t think he’s right, throwing banana peels, you get fired in America, you get fired in every company,” Lutnick told Bloomberg TV last week.
“Donald Trump loves conversation, he loves to get all sides of the idea. But then you make your choice and you go where the elected president of the United States goes,” Lutnick said. “Anybody who says otherwise – I don’t even know what they’re talking about, this is make-believe politics.”
The Harris campaign said that Trump’s latest comments indicate he thinks he is above the law. The campaign also pointed to the former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly, who said he believed Trump met the definition of a fascist. Harris said she agreed with that statement.
