Donald Trump made an “unprecedented criminal attempt” to “unlawfully retain power” after losing the 2020 election, Jack Smith said in a report released early Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Justice, with the special counsel expressing his confidence about the expressed prospects for a conviction. A trial that will not take place now that Trump returns to the White House.
The report details the special counsel’s decision to file a four-count indictment against Trump, accusing him of conspiring to obstruct the collection and certification of votes after his defeat by Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020.
It concludes that the evidence at trial would have been “sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction,” but his election victory on November 5 effectively ended the case. Previous Justice Department guidelines have discouraged indicting a sitting president, and Trump would undoubtedly have dropped the investigation upon his return to office on January 20.
Smith’s report claimed that Trump’s claims of voter fraud – whether baseless accusations of non-citizenship or voting machine tampering – were “demonstrably and in many cases patently false.”
“Trump used these lies,” Smith writes, “as a weapon to destroy a function of the federal government that is fundamental to the democratic process of the United States.”
Trump’s own vice president and other senior administration officials, as well as state officials closest to election administration, refuted his fraud allegations both publicly and privately.
“Mr. Trump’s false claims have been repeatedly debunked, often directly to him, by the very people best placed to discover their truth,” Smith wrote.
Trump’s former attorney general William Barr previously said he told the then-president that there was no widespread voter fraud in the election, and a Cybersecurity The split in the Trump administration reached the same conclusion. This came before a mob of his supporters attempted to stop Congress from certifying the election on January 6, 2021, leading to violence at the Capitol.
Decision to forego prosecution under the Insurrection Act explained
Much of the evidence cited in the report has been published previously.
But it contains some new details, such as that prosecutors were considering charging Trump with inciting the attack on the US Capitol under a US law called the Insurrection Act.
Prosecutors ultimately concluded that such a charge carried legal risks and that there was insufficient evidence that Trump sought the “full extent” of violence during the riots.
“The office has found no case in which a criminal defendant was charged with insurrection because he acted within the government to maintain power rather than overthrow or thwart it from outside,” Smith said.
The indictment accuses Trump of conspiring to obstruct the certification of elections, deceive the United States about accurate election results and deprive U.S. voters of their right to vote.
Smith’s office concluded that the charges against some co-conspirators accused of helping Trump carry out the plan may have been justified. However, prosecutors did not reach any final conclusions, according to the report.
Several of Trump’s former lawyers had previously been identified as co-conspirators referenced in the indictment.
Prosecutors gave a detailed overview of their case against Trump in earlier court filings. A congressional panel released its own 700-page report in 2022 on Trump’s actions after the 2020 election.
Both investigations concluded that after the 2020 election, Trump spread false claims of widespread voter fraud, pressured state legislatures not to certify the vote, and ultimately attempted to set up fraudulent voter groups that promised to vote in States that Biden had actually won voted for Trump in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.
The effort culminated in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed Congress in a failed attempt to stop lawmakers from certifying the vote.
Smith’s report found that Trump’s pressure campaign was selective.
“Significantly, he made electoral claims only to state legislators and executives who shared his political affiliation and were his political supporters, and only in states he lost,” he wrote.
Smith’s case was already facing legal hurdles before Trump’s election victory. It was paused for months while Trump claimed he could not be prosecuted for official actions as president.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority largely sided with him and granted former presidents broad immunity from prosecution.
“Prior to this case, no court had ever found that presidents are immune from criminal liability for their official acts, and no text in the Constitution expressly grants the president such criminal immunity,” Smith wrote.
“The special counsel’s office started from the same premise,” he said.
After the release, Trump called Smith a “lame duck prosecutor who couldn’t try his case before the election” in a post on his website Truth Social.
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland released by the U.S. Justice Department, Trump’s lawyers called the report a “politically motivated attack” and said releasing it before Trump’s return to the White House would harm the presidential transition.
Report any documents on hold
A second section of the report describes Smith’s case in which he accuses Trump of illegally storing classified national security documents after he left the White House in 2021, which also led to criminal charges.
Smith was appointed by Garland to investigate both matters in November 2022, the same month that Trump announced his plans to run in the 2024 election.
The Justice Department has pledged not to publish this portion while the trial against two Trump associates charged in the case is ongoing. Walt Bulls and Carlos De Oliveira.
The charges against Trump himself were dropped by a ruling by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, which Smith’s team planned to appeal before Trump’s victory on November 5.
Cannon has ordered the Justice Department to suspend plans to allow certain high-ranking members of Congress to privately view the document portion of the report.
Smith, who resigned last week amid relentless criticism from Trump, also defended his investigation and the prosecutors involved.
US President-elect Donald Trump will not serve prison time or pay fines but will become the first US president with a criminal record when he takes office later this month after a judge granted him unconditional release in his hush money trial.
“Mr. Trump’s assertion that my decisions as prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, ridiculous,” Smith wrote in a letter detailing his report.
Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in a New York state case involving falsifying business records related to hush money payments to a porn actress. However, a judge last week spared him a fine or prison time. The conviction still ensures that Trump will be the first president to take office with a felony conviction.
