Attorney General Merrick B. Garland nominated Mr. Smith as a special counsel, and he had indicated that he would resign prior to Donald J. Trump’s inauguration.

According to a footnote buried in court documents, Jack Smith, the special counsel who launched two unsuccessful federal indictments against President-elect Donald J. Trump, resigned last week. last was a remarkably subdued end to a battle that changed the legal and political landscape of the country.

According to a senior law enforcement official, Mr. Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor who engaged in a lengthy and acrimonious struggle with the Trump legal team on two fronts and lost in both a district court and the Trump-influenced Supreme Court, departed his offices in Washington on Friday.

His departure was anticipated. Prior to Mr. Trump taking office on January 20, Mr. Smith had made it clear that he intended to resign, threatening to terminate and punish him.

Mr. Smith ultimately made no official statement. His spokesperson remained silent.

After Mr. Trump’s election win in November effectively made the special counsel’s work in the courts irrelevant, he left. Mr. Smith was forced to drop both of the cases he had filed against Mr. Trump in 2023, one in Florida on charges of mishandling a cache of classified documents and the other in Washington on charges of conspiring to rig the 2020 election, due to a Justice Department policy that forbids the pursuit of prosecutions against a sitting president.

Another legal setback for Mr. Smith occurred during his last week, when Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump-appointed magistrate overseeing the Florida papers case, temporarily prevented the public release of his final report until at least Monday.

In a brief sent to Judge Cannon on Saturday, the final page contained the single line, “The special counsel completed his work and submitted his final confidential report on Jan. 7, 2025, and separated from the department on Jan. 10.” This marked the end of the monumental legal saga that had enraged Mr. Trump and prepared him for his extraordinary comeback to power.

One final stage in the more than two-year journey Mr. Smith completed by looking into and eventually charging Mr. Trump was left undone by his resignation: the publication of a two-volume report outlining his choices in both criminal cases.

For the past week, attorneys for Mr. Trump and his two co-defendants in the papers case have been engaged in a heated battle to prevent the publication of both volumes. They claim in court documents that the article unfairly implicates certain unidentified “anticipated” members of his new cabinet and is a “one-sided” and “illegal” political attack on the president-elect.

It’s essentially Mr. Smith’s farewell statement on the work he began when he was originally hired in November 2022, just after Mr. Trump declared he was reentering the presidential race. It includes his justifications for the charges he filed in the two cases, along with his legal justifications for not filing additional charges.

The ways in which each case passed away varied.

Judge Cannon’s July decision, which determined that Mr. Smith had been illegally appointed to his position as special counsel, rejected the secret materials argument altogether, defying decades of tradition. After Mr. Trump was re-elected, his deputies abandoned the challenge against him, but not against his two co-defendants, even though they challenged that decision.

In a historic decision, the Supreme Court hampered the election meddling case about the same time, giving Mr. Trump substantial immunity for official actions he made while in office. More significantly, the decision prevented a trial on the accusations prior to the election, in addition to casting doubt on numerous of the claims in Mr. Smith’s indictment.

The Justice Department stated earlier this week that it did not plan to make the bulk of Mr. Smith’s report on the case involving the classified documents available right away due to the ongoing prosecution of Mr. Trump’s former co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. The department stated that it intended to present that portion of the report to Congressmen in secret and release it to the public only after the procedures against the two men were over.

Nonetheless, the Justice Department intends to make the material pertaining to the election interference case available as soon as feasible. Judge Cannon, however, has been urged to extend her order prohibiting the report by the attorneys representing Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira.

Initially, Mr. Trump was the subject of two investigations by ordinary federal prosecutors. After Mr. Trump declared his intention to run for president, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland put Mr. Smith in charge of the cases to put some distance between the Justice Department and the investigations.