Jack Smith's legal team have filed their first response to ethics complaints filed against him by President Donald Trump's allies.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) persuaded the Office of Special Counsel, which has no affiliation with Smith's role during Joe Biden's presidency, to investigate whether he violated the law by seeking to quickly bring Trump to trial, but Smith and his lawyers Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski challenged the allegations in a three-page letter to the acting special counsel Jamieson Greer, reported the New York Times.

“The predicate for this investigation is imaginary and unfounded,” they wrote. “Mr. Smith followed well-established legal principles in conducting the investigations into President Trump, and the courts presiding over the resulting prosecutions have already rejected the spurious allegations that the manner in which Mr. Smith prosecuted these cases was somehow improper.”

Cotton accused the former special counsel, who was appointed by former Attorney General Merrick Garland and resigned after Trump's election, of having "no rationale except for an attempt to affect the 2024 election results" with his investigations of the once and future president during Biden's presidency.

“This investigation is premised on a partisan complaint that suggests the ordinary operation of the criminal justice system should be disrupted by the whims of a political contest,” Smith's lawyers wrote. “But the notion that justice should yield to politics is antithetical to the rule of law.”

The letter noted that Greer's office has publicly confirmed the ethics investigation, but they wrote that neither Smith nor his lawyers have received any inquiries from his office, and they urged him not to reach a conclusion without engaging.

"[We] welcome the opportunity to engage with your office and are confident that as you become familiar with the facts and the record, you will conclude that there is no basis to find a violation of the Hatch Act and that these allegations are wholly without merit," the letter stated.

Ethics expert Richard Painter told the Times a Hatch Act investigation of Smith makes no sense.

“I just don’t see how this comes anywhere close to a Hatch Act violation,” Painter said. “If Smith had made public statements shortly before the election about the filings, we would have an issue that would need to be addressed. Or if he’d written Congress, it would need to be addressed. I see no evidence that Jack Smith did anything of the kind. He simply filed pleadings with the court, and the pleadings were accepted by the courts.”