US special counsel Jack Smith argues that Donald Trump engaged in an “unprecedented criminal effort” to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, but that the president-elect’s election victory last November prevented him from pursuing the case. trial, according to a report published this Tuesday. The report details Smith’s decision to file a four-count indictment against Trump, accusing him of conspiring to obstruct the collection and certification of votes following his 2020 loss to Democratic President Joe Biden.
Smith concludes that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump at trial, but his imminent return to the presidency, scheduled for the 20th, made it impossible. Smith, who has been the subject of relentless criticism from Trump, also defends his investigation and the prosecutors who worked on it. Trump’s claim that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the administration [de Joe] Biden or other political actors is, in a word, ridiculous,” Smith writes in a letter sent to Congress this Tuesday, in which he details his 137-page report.
After the publication, Trump, in a message on his Truth Social network, called Smith a “slob prosecutor who couldn’t get his case tried before the election.” Much of the evidence cited in the report was previously made public. A second section of the report details the case in which Smith accuses Trump of illegally withholding sensitive national security documents after leaving the White House in 2021.
The Justice Department has agreed not to make that part public while legal proceedings continue against two Trump associates charged in the case. Smith, who left the Justice Department last week, dropped both cases against Trump after he won last year’s election, citing a long-standing Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president. None of these cases went to trial.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges. The president-elect, who often calls Smith “disturbed,” has described the cases as politically motivated attempts to damage his campaign and political movement. Trump and his two former co-defendants in the classified documents case have attempted to block the report’s release. The courts rejected their demands to prevent its publication altogether.
District Judge Aileen Cannon, who presided over the documents case, has ordered the Justice Department to pause for now plans to allow certain high-ranking members of Congress to privately review the documents section of the report. In 2022, a congressional panel released its own 700-page account of Trump’s actions after the 2020 election.
False accusations
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. Ultimately, Trump also tried to use fraudulent groups of electors in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory. The effort culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol in Washington, when a mob of Trump supporters broke into the House to prevent lawmakers from validating the result that gave the Democratic candidate as president.
Smith’s investigation faced legal hurdles even before Trump’s election victory last November. It stalled for months as the Republican leader pressed his claim that he could not be prosecuted for actions taken while he was still president. The conservative majority of the US Supreme Court largely sided with him, granting former presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution.
