Special counsel report says there was evidence to convict Trump of trying to subvert 2020 election
The report by Jack Smith, who resigned last week, claims that the president-elect participated in an ‘unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power’
Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated Donald Trump over alleged attempts to subvert the 2020 election result, found that the president-elect engaged in an “unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power” after losing the 2020 election to Joseph Biden, but that Trump’s victory on November 5 of last year prevented the prosecution from moving forward because of Justice Department policy prohibiting the prosecution of a sitting president. That’s according to a 137-page report released on Tuesday that holds that there was enough evidence to get Trump convicted at a trial.
Smith, who has been the target of relentless criticism by Trump, also defended his investigation and the prosecutors who worked on it. “The claim from Mr. Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable,” Smith wrote in a letter detailing his report, sent to Congress after midnight on Tuesday.
After the report’s release, Trump, in a post on his Truth Social site, called Smith a “a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide.” Much of the evidence cited in the report had been previously made public. A second section of the report, which deals with separate charges against Trump for mishandling sensitive classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021, has remained confidential 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 longstanding Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president. Neither case went to trial.
The president-elect, who often calls Smith “deranged,” has described the cases as politically motivated attempts to damage his election campaign and political movement. Trump and his two former co-defendants in the classified documents case had sought to block the report’s release. The courts rejected their demands to block its release entirely.
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. He also ultimately sought “to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost” in an attempt to stop 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 stormed Congress in a failed attempt to stop lawmakers from certifying the vote.
Smith’s investigation faced legal hurdles even before Trump’s election victory. It was halted for months as Trump pressed his claim 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 criminal prosecution.
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