Trump plans to fire US Attorney Jack Smith's team and use DOJ to investigate 2020 election 'irregularities'

President-elect Donald Trump is set to fire the team of prosecutor Jack Smith, who led two criminal prosecutions against the Republican front-runner and was accused on different occasions of using his powers at the Department of Justice (DOJ) as a political weapon against Trump.

Likewise, Trump would also be planning, although not immediately, to organize a special team within the DOJ to investigate the irregularities of the 2020 elections, in which Joe Biden prevailed by winning most of the swing states. So far, Trump insists, without concrete evidence, that he suffered "fraud" in the battleground states.

These two Trump ideas were revealed in a report by The Washington Post, which cited unnamed sources within the president-elect's team.

According to the WaPo, the two ideas "offer new evidence that Trump’s intention to dramatically shake up the status quo in Washington is likely to focus heavily on the Justice Department," the top law enforcement agency in the United States.

However, Trump may face obstacles in moving forward with his plans.

First, part of Smith's team is made up of career lawyers who are usually protected against political retaliation, especially after Biden reversed the "Schedule F" executive order upon reaching the White House.

That order was passed by Trump before he left office in 2021 and reclassified large sectors of public employees making it easier to fire them. In reversing it, Biden strengthened protections for career staff.

While Trump plans to reinstate the Schedule F rule, even so, experts say it could take years to implement, especially since firing large numbers of public employees could be subject to lengthy court litigation.

"The protections that Biden put in will help, but it will be a fight," Rushab Sanghvi, acting general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, told the WaPo.

Rushab represents some Justice Department employees, but not specifically prosecutors, who are the ones Trump wants to fire.

Likewise, it is also likely that the president-elect will not be able to make good on his promise to personally fire U.S. Attorney Smith, who plans to resign his post in December as he looks to close his cases against the GOP.

When the newspaper queried Trump's transition team about the idea of investigating the 2020 election and firing Smith's team, the chief spokeswoman was clear in responding that the president-elect was voted by Americans to purge the DOJ.

"President Trump campaigned on firing rogue bureaucrats who have engaged in the illegal weaponization of our American justice system, and the American people can expect he will deliver on that promise," said Karoline Leavitt, Trump's press secretary. "One of the many reasons that President Trump won the election in a landslide is Americans are sick and tired of seeing their tax dollars spent on targeting the Biden-Harris Administration’s political enemies rather than going after real violent criminals in our streets."

In recent years, the debate over the instrumentalization of the Justice Department picked up steam in the wake of Trump's legal battles against federal prosecutors that Republicans say were politically motivated.

Often, Republicans used the argument that the DOJ treated Trump unfairly, comparing his case of, for example, the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago with that of Joe Biden, who was treated less harshly because of his age and mental acuity according to a special report.

Some Republican-leaning pundits also pointed to the Stormy Daniels case in New York as proof of how a motivated prosecutor can stretch a legal theory into a case against a former president and presidential candidate.

Now Democrats, as reports emerge of how Trump plans to reconfigure the DOJ, are accusing the president-elect of instrumentalizing justice against his political opponents in retaliation for these four years of legal battles.