For all their complexity, the Trump-related prosecutions have not significantly constrained the ability of prosecutors to carry out their regular duties, officials have said.
Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing criminal investigations into former President Donald J. Trump, employs 40 to 60 career prosecutors, paralegals and support staff, augmented by a rotating cast of F.B.I. agents and technical specialists, according to people familiar with the situation.
In his first four months on the job, starting in November, Mr. Smith’s investigation incurred expenses of $9.2 million. That included $1.9 million to pay the U.S. Marshals Service to protect Mr. Smith, his family and other investigators who have faced threats after the former president and his allies singled them out on social media.
At this rate, the special counsel is on track to spend about $25 million a year.
The main driver of all these efforts and their concurrent expenses is Mr. Trump’s own behavior — his unwillingness to accept the results of an election as every one of his predecessors has done, his refusal to heed his own lawyers’ advice and a grand jury’s order to return government documents and his lashing out at prosecutors in personal terms.
Even the $25 million figure only begins to capture the full scale of the resources dedicated by federal, state and local officials to address Mr. Trump’s behavior before, during and after his presidency. While no comprehensive statistics are available, Justice Department officials have long said that the effort alone to prosecute the members of the pro-Trump mob who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is the largest investigation in its history — and that line of inquiry is only one of many criminal and civil efforts being brought to hold Mr. Trump and his allies to account.
As the department and prosecutors in New York and Georgia move to charge Mr. Trump, the current Republican presidential front-runner, the scope of their work, in terms of quantifiable costs, is gradually becoming clear.
These efforts, taken as a whole, do not appear to be siphoning resources that would otherwise be used to combat crime or undertake other investigations. But the agencies are paying what one official called a “Trump tax” — forcing leaders to expend disproportionate time and energy on the former president, and defending themselves against his unfounded claims that they are persecuting him at the expense of public safety.
In a political environment growing more polarized as the 2024 presidential race takes shape, Republicans have made the scale of the federal investigation of Mr. Trump and his associates an issue in itself. Earlier this month, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee grilled the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, on the scale of the investigations, and suggested they might block the reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program used to investigate several people suspected of involvement in the Jan. 6 breach or oppose funding for the bureau’s new headquarters.
“What Jack Smith is doing is actually pretty cheap considering the momentous nature of the charges,” said Timothy J. Heaphy, former U.S. attorney who served as lead investigator for the House committee that investigated the Capitol assault.
The “greater cost” is likely to be the damage inflicted by relentless attacks on the department, which could be “incalculable,” he added.
