Special Counsel Jack Smith has asked two federal courts to dismiss federal charges against President-elect Donald Trump, citing the position of the U.S. Department of Justice that it cannot prosecute a sitting president. But as the federal courts weigh these matters, it is critical to our system of justice to consider that state courts have concurrent jurisdiction over the crimes committed by Trump.

Two pillars of American criminal law come foremost to mind. The first is the principle that no man is above the law. The second is that no man may be judge and jury of his own case. The fact that Trump will be placing his hands squarely on the scale of justice for his benefit in his own case is unprecedented in American legal annals and is fundamentally appalling for the very reason that those two principles are bedrocks of our American criminal justice system. Now is the time for state prosecutors with jurisdiction over Trump’s outrageous crimes to step up, be counted for democracy and aggressively pursue these eminently provable cases alleging theft of classified documents and conspiracy regarding his actions on and before Jan. 6, 2021.

Destroying or ignoring settled law and time-honored norms of our established judicial system are not new approaches for Trump. He has already announced that he will be a “dictator” on “Day 1” and expressly called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” when it suits him. This is why his own handpicked chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from his first term called him “a fascist to the core.“ But what matters now in the scope of the pending federal prosecutions against the president-elect is that they are fully and finally addressed within our criminal judicial system, which most importantly includes both federal crimes, where Trump can arrogantly order these charges to be dismissed, and state crimes, where he has zero authority.

Smith has served for many years as a federal prosecutor. I served for over 17 years as a state prosecutor, handling every type of crime imaginable, including the high-profile murder prosecution of John du Pont, one of the few rich defendants to serve long prison sentences and to eventually die in prison. While one would think that an experienced prosecutor like Jack Smith needs no advice from an experienced state prosecutor, the two systems collaborate far too infrequently and often know very little about one another’s laws and practices. This is counterintuitive to be sure, but still very true.

An issue that is being overlooked far too blithely in assessing the future of Trump’s federal criminal cases in Florida (stealing, maintaining and disclosing sensitive, confidential, classified documents that endangered American lives and security) and in Washington, D.C., (the creation, instigation and direction of an insurrection upon the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn an election) is that these crimes also involve criminal conduct fully prosecutable in state courts, albeit with different crime names and procedures.

Because of the nature of Trump’s conspiracies and use of interstate transportation and communication to transport documents and create conspiracies with others across the nation, these crimes are fully prosecutable not just in one state court but in states from Florida to New Jersey to New York, and across the continent to California. Trump and his accomplices engaged in extensive conspiratorial discussions over two months with a wide variety of conspirators, including Rudy Giuliani in New York and John Eastman in California. Those conspiratorial discussions, and Trump’s solicitation of clearly criminal activity to obstruct critical governmental functions, plainly impacted the rights of citizens of states to have a duly elected president certified and installed into office.

And of course, there’s even more criminal activity to pursue in Florida and New Jersey. The possession of highly confidential purloined documents at Mar-a-Lago and at Trump’s Bedminster Club in New Jersey constituted at the very least the crimes of theft, receiving stolen property and obstruction of governmental functions.

Smith has not only the option but the prosecutorial duty to collect the evidence in these cases and transmit it (with approval of grand jury judges as necessary) to every potentially relevant state prosecutor with jurisdiction over Trump’s crimes. This is specifically authorized by the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure which provide for disclosure of Grand Jury evidence: “The court may authorize disclosure … of a grand-jury matter … at the request of the government if it shows that the matter may disclose a violation of State … criminal law.”

Given the two constitutional principles cited at the outset, such state prosecutions should be brought as soon as possible, even if activity on these cases must be deferred during Trump’s presidency. Securing justice — delayed though it might be — must always be our guiding light as Americans. Having tried many jury trials in my career, I have total confidence in our jury system, and since no man is above the law, let’s let our state prosecutors and our great jury system do their respective jobs.

Dennis C. McAndrews was a state prosecutor for 17 years in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.