President Donald Trump’s latest effort to use the Department of Justice against his enemies is unlikely to succeed for a simple reason: geography. Former federal prosecutors told NBC News that Trump’s effort to prosecute former special counsel Jack Smith would likely meet the same fate as other recent lawfare attempts. As one lawmaker put it, “It will get laughed out of court.”

NBC News reported that “Trump has made no secret that he thinks former special counsel Jack Smith should be prosecuted, but his administration would be likely to have a tough time pursuing the charges a top Republican in Congress recommended last week.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), a close Trump ally, said Smith should be prosecuted for allegedly misleading Congress about the investigation into Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. But several former federal prosecutors said Smith would likely be protected by two obstacles.

The first is venue. “The Sixth Amendment requires criminal prosecutions to be brought in the jurisdictions where the crimes were committed,” NBC explained. “Because Smith testified in person in Washington, several former prosecutors said, the charges would need to be brought in Washington.” That matters because venue is not a technical footnote; it is one of the basic constitutional limits that can end a case before it gets to a jury.

“I don’t see a way this could be charged elsewhere,” Mike Romano, a former attorney in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, said of any possible charge over the testimony. “It happened in D.C. when he testified at Congress; it would have to be charged in D.C.”

That could be a major problem for Trump’s allies. In Washington, D.C., “grand jurors have previously rejected novel cases against people Trump wants imprisoned.” Grand juries are made up of local residents, and Trump received only 6 percent of the vote in D.C. in 2024. NBC noted that the city’s jurors “have generally stood as a bulwark against some of the administration’s most aggressive maneuvers,” including a failed effort by allies of Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, to indict six sitting members of Congress over a social media video in February. While federal grand juries often function as rubber stamps for assistant U.S. attorneys and usually find probable cause, D.C. grand juries have pushed back in Trump’s second term, including declining last summer to indict a man on a felony charge for throwing a Subway sandwich at an officer.

Gregory P. Rosen, a former supervisor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, said the case would also face a high legal bar. “Even if you could get a charge to technically clear the bar, any competent prosecutor still has to ask the threshold question: Is this worth bringing? Is the juice worth the squeeze?” Rosen said. “I have a hard time — to say it mildly — seeing how this gets past a grand jury, let alone in front of a jury that has to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Rosen also said the point may not be a good-faith prosecution. “What the administration has done so far has been to bring weak cases that nonetheless make a splash in the news, suggest that there is some wrongdoing by people and create a real drain on people’s time and money and resources to have to defend themselves. That’s not how the criminal justice system is supposed to work,” he said. In that sense, the dispute is less about a straightforward criminal case than about whether the legal process itself can be turned into a political weapon.

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) agreed. “This referral, if ever brought before a judge, will get laughed out of court. But success on the merits is not the goal. It is meant to harass Jack Smith. It is meant to please their Fox News viewership. It is meant to whitewash their own participation in a scheme to overthrow our elections,” Raskin said.