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Donald Trump engaged in 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, and the special counsel said he believed into the prospect of a conviction at trial that won’t happen now that Trump is back in the White House.
The report detailed the special counsel’s decision to file a four-count indictment against Trump, accusing him of planning to interfere with the collection and verification of votes following his 2020 defeat of Democratic President Joe Biden.
It concluded that the evidence would have been “sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction” at trial, but his election victory on November 5 effectively ended the case. Previous Justice Department guidance advised against indicting the sitting president, and Trump would undoubtedly end the investigations after his return to office on January 20.
Smith’s report asserted that Trump’s claims of voter fraud — whether unfounded allegations of non-citizen voting or manipulation of voting machines — were “provably and, in many cases, patently false.”
“Trump has used these lies,” Smith writes, “as a weapon to defeat the function of the federal government that is fundamental to the democratic process of the United States.”
Trump’s vice president and other senior administration officials, as well as government officials closest to the election administration, have denied his claims of fraud both publicly and privately.
“Mr. Trump’s false claims have been repeatedly exposed, often directly to him by the people best placed to determine their truth,” Smith wrote.
Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, previously said he told the president at the time that there was no widespread fraud in the election, and cyber security a division in the Trump administration has reached the same conclusion. This was before a crowd of his supporters tried to prevent Congress from certifying the January 6, 2021 election, resulting in violence at the Capitol.
The decision to drop charges under the Sedition Act explained
Much of the evidence cited in the report has already been made public.
But it includes some new details, such as that prosecutors were considering charging Trump with inciting an attack on the US Capitol under a US law known as the Sedition Act.
Prosecutors ultimately concluded that such a charge presented legal risks and that there was insufficient evidence that Trump intended the “full extent” of violence during the riots.
“The office has not found a single case in which a defendant has been charged with sedition because he acted within the government to maintain power, rather than to overthrow or thwart it from without,” Smith said.
The indictment charged Trump with conspiracy to interfere with the certification of elections, defraud the United States of accurate election results, and deprive American voters of their voting rights.
Smith’s office determined that charges may have been warranted against some co-conspirators accused of helping Trump carry out the plan, but the report said prosecutors had not reached final conclusions.
Several of Trump’s former lawyers were previously identified as co-conspirators named in the indictment.
Prosecutors have detailed their case against Trump in previous court filings. The 2022 Congressional Caucus released its own 700-page report on Trump’s actions after the 2020 election.
Both investigations concluded that Trump spread false claims of widespread voter fraud after the 2020 election and pressured state lawmakers not to certify the vote, and ultimately also tried to use fake groups of voters who pledged to vote for Trump in states that Biden actually carried. won, in an attempt to prevent Congress from confirming Biden’s victory.
The effort culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed Congress in an unsuccessful attempt to stop lawmakers from confirming the vote.
Smith’s report said the pressure campaign against Trump was selective.
“Significantly, he made election demands only to state legislators and executive officials who shared his political affiliation and were his political supporters, and only in states he lost,” he wrote.
Smith’s case faced legal hurdles even before Trump’s election victory. It was paused for months while Trump argued that he could not be prosecuted for official actions taken as president.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority largely sided with him, granting former presidents broad immunity from prosecution.
“Prior to this case, no court had ever held that presidents are immune from criminal liability for their official acts, and no text in the Constitution expressly grants such criminal immunity to the president,” Smith wrote.
“The office (of the special prosecutor’s office) started from the same premise,” he said.
After his release, Trump called Smith “the one prosecutor who failed to prosecute his case before the election” in a post on his Truth Social page.
In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland released by the US Justice Department, Trump’s lawyers called the report a “politically motivated attack” and said its release before Trump’s return to the White House would harm the presidential transition.
Application to pending documents
The second part of the report details Smith’s case accusing Trump of illegally retaining sensitive national security documents after he left the White House in 2021, which also led to criminal charges.
Garland appointed Smith to investigate both matters in November 2022 — the same month Trump announced his plans to run in 2024.
The Department of Justice has pledged not to release that part while the legal proceedings against the two Trump associates accused in this case are pending. Walt Bulls and Carlos De Oliveira.
The charges against Trump himself were dismissed in a ruling by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, which Smith’s team had planned to appeal before Trump’s Nov. 5 election victory.
Cannon ordered the Justice Department to halt for now plans to allow certain senior members of Congress to privately view a section of the report’s documents.
Smith, who resigned last week and faced relentless criticism from Trump, also defended his investigation and the prosecutors who worked on it.
US President-elect Donald Trump will not have to serve jail time or pay fines, but will be the first US president with a criminal record when he takes office later this month after a judge acquitted him unconditionally in a money laundering trial.
“Mr. Trump’s claim that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, ludicrous,” Smith wrote in a letter detailing his report.
Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts in the New York state case involving a scheme to falsify business records related to secret cash payments to a porn actress, but a judge last week spared him a fine or jail time. A conviction would still ensure that Trump would become the first president to take office with a felony conviction on his record.
