The special counsel says in the final report on the 2020 election case that Trump participated in an “unprecedented criminal effort.”

Donald Trump engaged in an “unprecedented criminal effort” to “illegally retain power” after losing the 2020 election, Jack Smith said in a report published by the US Justice Department early Tuesday, with the special counsel expressing confidence in Trump’s prospects for conviction. It is a trial that will not happen now that Trump is back in 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 2020 defeat by Democratic President Joe Biden.

It concluded that the evidence was “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 a sitting president, and Trump would almost certainly have moved to close the investigations after he returned to office on January 20.

Smith’s report asserted that Trump’s claims about voter fraud — whether unsubstantiated claims about noncitizens voting or tampering with voting machines — were “patently false and, in many cases, patently false.”

“Trump has weaponized these lies to defeat the federal government’s essential function of the democratic process in the United States,” Smith writes.

Trump’s vice president and other senior administration officials, as well as state officials closest to running the election, have refuted his claims of public and private fraud.

“Mr. Trump’s false claims have been repeatedly debunked, often directed directly at him by the people best positioned to ascertain their truth,” Smith wrote.

Trump’s former Attorney General, William Barr, had previously said that he informed the president at the time that there was no widespread fraud in the elections, and that Cyber ​​security The division in the Trump administration reached the same conclusion. This came before a mob of his supporters attempted to prevent Congress from certifying the election on January 6, 2021, leading to violence at the Capitol.

He explained the decision to abandon the Insurrection Act charge

Much of the evidence cited in the report has been previously made public.

But it includes some new details, such as that prosecutors considered charging Trump with inciting that attack on the US Capitol under a US law known as the Insurrection Act.

Prosecutors ultimately concluded that such a charge posed legal risks and that there was insufficient evidence that Trump intended to commit the “full scope” of violence during the riot.

“The office has found no case in which a criminal defendant was charged with sedition because he worked within the government to maintain power, rather than to overthrow or thwart it from the outside,” Smith said.

The indictment accused Trump of conspiring to obstruct the certification of the election, defraud the United States to obtain accurate election results, and deprive American voters of their voting rights.

Smith’s office decided that charges may have been justified against some of the conspirators accused of helping Trump carry out the plan, but the report said prosecutors had not reached final conclusions.

Several former Trump lawyers have been identified as co-conspirators named in the indictment.

Prosecutors have detailed their case against Trump in previous court filings. A congressional committee in 2022 published its own 700-page account of Trump’s actions after the 2020 election.

Both investigations concluded that Trump spread false claims of widespread voter fraud after the 2020 election, pressured state lawmakers not to certify the vote, and, ultimately, also sought to use fraudulent pools of electors who pledged to vote for Trump in states won by Biden. Indeed, in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.

The efforts culminated in the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed Congress in a failed attempt to prevent lawmakers from certifying the vote.

Smith’s report indicated that Trump’s pressure campaign was selective.

“Importantly, he made election 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 faced legal hurdles even before Trump won the election. He was suspended for months while Trump pressed his claim that he could not be sued for official actions he took as president.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority sided largely with him, granting former presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution.

“Prior to this case, no court had ever found that presidents are immune from criminal liability for their official acts, and no provision in the Constitution expressly grants the president such criminal immunity,” Smith wrote.

He added, “The (Special Adviser’s) office started from the same premise.”

After his release, Trump, in a post on Truth Social, called Smith a “feckless prosecutor who couldn’t get his case tried before the election.”

In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland published by the US Department of Justice, Trump’s lawyers called the report a “politically motivated attack” and said publishing it before Trump returns to the White House would harm the presidential transition.

Reporting pending documents

The second section of the report details the Smith case in which Trump was accused of illegally retaining sensitive national security documents after leaving the White House in 2021, which also led to a criminal indictment.

Smith was appointed by Garland to investigate both matters in November 2022 — the same month Trump announced his plans to run in 2024.

The Department of Justice has committed not to publish this part publicly while legal proceedings continue against two Trump aides accused in the case. Walt Bulls And Carlos D Oliveira.

Charges against Trump himself were dismissed in a ruling by US District Judge Eileen Cannon, which Smith’s team planned to appeal before Trump won the election on November 5.

Cannon ordered the Justice Department to halt plans for now to allow some senior members of Congress to privately review the documents section of the report.

Smith, who resigned last week and faced relentless criticism from Trump, also defended his investigation and the prosecutors who worked on it.

“Mr. Trump’s claim that my decisions as Attorney General 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.

Trump was convicted in a New York state case of 34 criminal counts related to a scheme to falsify business records in connection with hush money payments to a pornographic actress, but the judge last week spared him a fine or prison sentence. A conviction would still ensure that Trump would become the first president to take office with a felony conviction on his record.