Special Counsel Jack Smith has moved to dismiss both federal criminal cases against Donald Trump on the simple premise that he will be president once more in less than two months’ time, and longtime Department of Justice policy dictates that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

So, at long last, the attempted election overthrow case and the purloined classified documents indictment end with a whimper and not the bang that may have been at their conclusion: the first-ever federal conviction of a former president, for crimes related to the nation’s very democracy and security, no less.

Trump and his supporters in politics and the media will claim the charges were weak and shouldn’t have been filed. They’ll expect the public to consider it proof that these proceedings were a nothing-burger. “Case dismissed” is a popular comedic shorthand for a reason; it means there’s nothing to see here.

This is a lie. There’s plenty to see and we all saw it. We watched Trump hype up the crowd that went forth to, in their own words, hang Mike Pence for refusing to play ball on an ongoing coup attempt. We heard the recording of Trump leaning on Brad Raffensperger.

We saw the pictures of the classified documents strewn haphazardly about Trump’s property, including boxes in a bathroom, and read the testimony about Trump’s efforts to hide the documents, which he considered personal property, from investigators.

The Trump legal team’s defenses never made much sense if you bought that their goal was to actually disprove the facts, because that was not the objective. Part of Trump’s selling point is the idea that he can do whatever he wants, and he was proud of his actions to that end. The real goal was two-prong: to establish that Trump actually had the right to do whatever he wanted, and could not be held to the strictures of the law, and to run out the clock on whatever parts of the case survived the first assault. On both counts, Trump won big.

He got the Supreme Court, including three justices he appointed, to rule that he had immunity for all core functions of the presidency and practically all broadly construed “official acts,” both delaying the cases and giving himself much freer rein to use the full extent of the awesome executive authority vested in the president during his second term. Then, aided by the naked favoritism of other Trump-appointed judges like Aileen Cannon, his often-frivolous legal maneuvering and ultimate electoral win has let him shed the cases altogether.

Let’s be clear that part of the blame rests on the historic miscalculations of the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland, who appointed the cautious Smith to begin building the federal cases in mid-November 2022, two full years after Trump was plotting to undo his 2020 defeat.

There was no reason not to start probing Trump immediately after that attack on our electoral system of government, following his Senate impeachment acquittal. Going after him aggressively would not, as some worried, have signaled a break with the rule of law but an adherence to it. Due process is well beyond what failed insurrectionists often get. Maybe one day Trump will answer for these crimes, but for now it is too late.

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