WASHINGTON — Special counsel Jack Smith is evaluating how to wind down the two federal cases against President-elect Donald Trump before Trump takes office in light of long-standing Justice Department policy that says sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted, a person familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

Smith charged Trump last year with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. But Trump’s election defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris means that the Justice Department believes he can no longer face prosecution in accordance with department legal opinions meant to shield presidents from criminal charges while in office.

The person familiar with Smith’s plans spoke on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press.

By moving to wind down the cases before the inauguration in January, Smith and the DOJ would be averting a potential showdown with Trump, who said as recently as last month that he would fire Smith “within two seconds” of taking office. It would also mean Trump would enter the White House without the legal cloud of federal criminal prosecutions that once carried the potential for felony convictions and prison sentences.

Smith’s two cases charge Trump in a conspiracy to undo the election results in the run-up to the Capitol riot, and with retaining top secret records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and obstructing FBI efforts to recover them. Smith was appointed to the position in November 2022 by Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The classified documents case has been stalled since July when a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, dismissed it on grounds that Smith was illegally appointed. Smith has appealed to the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where the request to revive the case is pending. Even as Smith looks to withdraw the documents case, he would seem likely to continue to challenge Cannon’s ruling on the legality of his appointment given the precedent such a ruling would create.

In the 2020 election interference case, Trump was scheduled to stand trial in March in Washington, where more than 1,000 of his supporters have been convicted of charges for their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. But the case was halted as Trump pursued his sweeping claims of immunity from prosecution that ultimately landed before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Deadly Israeli airstrike: Lebanese rescuers pulled 30 bodies out of the rubble after a late-night Israeli strike on an apartment building in the town of Barja, Lebanon’s Civil Defense service said Wednesday.

It remained unclear if there were any survivors or bodies still trapped under the debris following the Tuesday night airstrike, which came without warning. Barja is a town just north of the port city of Sidon in central Lebanon.

Israeli forces and the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group have been clashing for more than a year, since Hezbollah started firing rockets across the border soon after the Palestinian Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack from Gaza into southern Israel sparked the ongoing war there.

The war on the Lebanese front has substantially escalated since mid-September, with Israel launching a massive aerial bombardment and ground invasion.

Meanwhile, a rocket attack killed a foreign worker near the northern Israeli city of Acre.

Sirens also blared across northern and central Israel, including in the metro area of Tel Aviv, as Hezbollah launched 10 rockets.

Lebanon files complaint: Lebanon filed a complaint against Israel at the U.N.’s labor organization over the string of deadly attacks involving exploding pagers, saying workers were among those killed and injured, a Lebanese government minister said Wednesday.

The wave of remotely triggered explosions that hit pagers and walkie-talkies carried by Hezbollah members in mid-September were widely blamed on Israel, which has neither confirmed nor denied involvement.

The blasts that went off in grocery stores, homes and on streets killed at least 37 people, including two children, and wounded around 3,000 people, according to Lebanese authorities, deeply unsettling even Lebanese who have no Hezbollah affiliation.

In addition to fighters, the detonating devices hit workers in Hezbollah’s civilian institutions, including its health care and media operations.

Category 3 storm: Hurricane Rafael made landfall in Cuba on Wednesday as a powerful Category 3 hurricane, shortly after strong winds knocked out the country’s power grid.

Forecasters warned Rafael could bring “life-threatening” storm surges, winds and flash floods to western swaths of the island after it knocked out power and dumped rain on the Cayman Islands and Jamaica the day before.

The storm was located 40 miles south-southwest of Havana on Wednesday. It had maximum sustained winds of 115 mph and was moving northwest at 14 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Forecasters expected the storm to weaken over Cuba before emerging in the southeastern Gulf of Mexico.

Inheritance plot: A British doctor who was disgruntled about his inheritance and tried to kill his mother’s boyfriend by injecting him with a fake COVID-19 vaccine that was poison was sentenced Wednesday to 31 years in prison.

Dr. Thomas Kwan disguised himself as a nurse making home virus booster visits to infect Patrick O’Hara with a flesh-eating poison because he believed the older man stood in the way of him inheriting his mother’s home some day.

Kwan, 53, pleaded guilty last month in Newcastle Crown Court to attempted murder.

O’Hara, 72, survived after being in intensive care for several weeks and having part of his arm cut away.

The ordeal left him “a shell of an individual,” he said.

O’Hara and Kwan’s mother, Jenny Leung, have since split up.

Police used surveillance camera footage to track down Kwan.