Special counsel Jack Smith says evidence against Trump was enough to convict him
The report on federal charges against Trump for election interference in 2020 offers special counsel Jack Smith a last chance to explain his decisions after dropping the case.
Special Counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks on a recently unsealed indictment against Donald Trump in August 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
This story originally appeared on NPR.
The Department of Justice’s long-awaited election interference report against Donald Trump, released early Tuesday, said the evidence against the president-elect would have led to his conviction at trial — if not for his election victory that led to charges being dropped.
Prosecutors wound down the two federal criminal cases against Trump after he won the 2024 election, following longstanding department precedent, and the final report by special counsel Jack Smith is their last chance to explain their decisions.
Smith, in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland prefacing the report, defended his work and his team, as well as his impartiality in pursuing the federal cases against Trump, whom prosecutors ended up charging with election interference in Washington, D.C., and with hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort and refusing to return them to the FBI.
The report says the evidence would have led to Trump’s conviction at trial, “but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency.” Longstanding Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting a sitting president.
Smith said he fully stood behind the decision to bring the cases: “To have done otherwise on the facts developed during our work would have been to shirk my duties as a prosecutor and a public servant. After nearly 30 years of public service, that is a choice I could not abide.”
The 137-page report lays out prosecutors’ evidence of Trump’s efforts to influence the election and propagate election claims he knew were false.
Legal fight over release
Florida district judge Aileen Cannon on Monday paved the way for the DOJ to release the first part of Smith’s inquiry into Trump, covering the investigation and four felony charges against him tied to the 2020 presidential election. Cannon denied a motion by Trump’s former co-defendants who sought to block the release.
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Listen 6:10The DOJ agreed not to publicly release volume two of its report, about the classified documents case, to avoid interfering with an ongoing case against two other defendants. But it wanted to release the first volume, covering the investigation and charges against Trump tied to the 2020 presidential election.
Trump has argued the special counsel was appointed unlawfully, and that any public report would be legally invalid and hurt his transition into the White House. He has sought to intervene in the Florida case to block the report’s release, and had threatened to fire Smith once he’s inaugurated on Jan. 20.
“Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social after the report’s release.
Smith strongly defended the report’s work, and emphasized that the DOJ never sought to interfere in it.
“To all who know me well, 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,” he wrote.
“I can assure you that neither l nor the prosecutors on my team would have tolerated or taken part in any action by our Office for partisan political purposes. My Office had one north star: to follow the facts and law wherever they led. Nothing more and nothing less.”
Not enough proof of insurrection
The report offered few fresh details on Trump’s alleged effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden. But it contrasted Trump’s public statements with what he told aides and family members after that loss and highlighted what prosecutors viewed as pervasive “deceit.” The report cast Trump as the head of a conspiracy who “sought legal cover” from his alleged co-conspirators.
Federal prosecutors did not charge anyone else in connection with that alleged conspiracy. But their report said that before work wound down, “the Office had made a preliminary determination that the admissible evidence could justify seeking charges against certain co-conspirators.”
Prosecutors also revealed that they had contemplated charging Trump with “insurrection” but they could not prove that he engaged in that rarely charged offense himself.
They also evaluated Trump’s remarks near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as possible criminal “incitement.” But they couldn’t develop direct evidence that Trump had intended to “cause the full scope of the violence that occurred” that day.
The report described brutal assaults on police by a mob that wielded flag poles and bear spray, including photos of scenes that law enforcement has likened to hand-to-hand combat. More than 140 officers suffered injuries, some that forced their early retirement.
As for repeated claims by Trump and his allies that the Justice Department had interfered in the 2024 election, Smith pointed out he had worked swiftly to obtain the indictment in the August before an election year.
Prosecutors had to spend months secretly litigating executive privilege claims by Trump and his aides — and the Supreme Court added to the delay by not ordering speedy argument in Trump’s immunity case and waiting until last July to hand down its decision.
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