The Justice Department released a 137-page volume early Tuesday morning laying out the details of the investigation that the former special counsel Jack Smith conducted into President-elect Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
The release of the report, which Mr. Trump’s legal team had vehemently fought, is likely to be the Justice Department’s final word on the attempt to use the legal system to hold Mr. Trump accountable for conspiring to subvert the election results. Because Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, prosecutors were forced under a binding Justice Department policy to drop the case against him.
Criminal investigators, the report said, interviewed more than 250 people and obtained grand jury testimony from more than 55 witnesses — some after lengthy battles over executive privilege. Mr. Smith said the work of the House committee that separately examined the Capitol attack was only “a small part of the office’s investigative record.”
Mr. Smith wrote a second volume about separate charges he filed accusing Mr. Trump of refusing to give back troves of classified documents after leaving office in 2021. That volume remains out of the public eye for now because remnants of that case are still active against two Trump aides charged as co-conspirators.
Here are four takeaways from the election case volume.
Smith said Trump would have been convicted at trial.
In what amounted to his report’s most important finding, Mr. Smith asserted he was confident that his team of prosecutors and investigators had amassed enough evidence to convict Mr. Trump had the case been allowed to go to trial.
The report spent nearly 30 pages recounting the details of how Mr. Trump engaged in multiple criminal conspiracies. Much of that was already in public view through the indictment in the case and a lengthy evidentiary memo that Mr. Smith filed in October as part of the fallout from the Supreme Court’s ruling that Mr. Trump enjoyed presumptive immunity for his official acts as president.
Mr. Smith said his office “stands fully behind” both “the strength of the government’s proof” and “the merits of the prosecution.” And despite the major setbacks he faced in his more than two years of pursuing the case, he stuck by the core accusations leveled against Mr. Trump.
“The through line of all of Mr. Trump’s criminal efforts was deceit — knowingly false claims of election fraud — and the evidence shows that Mr. Trump used these lies as a weapon to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process,” Mr. Smith wrote.
Still, Mr. Smith conceded that no matter how persuasive a case he believed he had built, there was no choice but to drop the charges after Mr. Trump won the election in November. That victory, he acknowledged, triggered a longstanding and binding Justice Department policy prohibiting criminal cases from moving forward against sitting presidents.
“The department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical,” Mr. Smith wrote.
He continued: “Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”
Smith blamed Trump for the Capitol riot, but explained why he did not charge him with incitement.
Reflecting the strength of the First Amendment’s protections for free speech, Mr. Smith never explicitly accused Mr. Trump of inciting the riot by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. His indictment and other court filings put a heavier emphasis on Mr. Trump’s actions in the weeks and months leading up to that attack.
Still, in his report, Mr. Smith laid out his analysis of Mr. Trump’s culpability for the mob violence while explaining why he decided not to add a formal charge of incitement to the indictment.
On a moral level, the prosecutor squarely assigned responsibility for the attack on the Capitol to Mr. Trump. He portrayed the rioters as heeding Mr. Trump’s words in the fiery speech he delivered near the White House shortly before the attack.
That context, Mr. Smith wrote, showed that “the violence was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it,” that it benefited his plan to interfere with Congress’s certification of President Biden’s Electoral College victory, and that he made a conscious decision to leverage the riot for more delays rather than stopping it.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Smith wrote, prosecutors concluded that “there were reasonable arguments to be made” that Mr. Trump’s speech incited the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The speech, Mr. Smith argued, satisfied the Supreme Court’s standard for incitement to overcome any First Amendment defense — “particularly when the speech is viewed in the context of Mr. Trump’s lengthy and deceitful voter-fraud narrative that came before it.”
But Mr. Smith said there were also arguments that the available evidence fell short of what would be needed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt one crucial element of the legal test for incitement: that Mr. Trump intended for the mob violence to unfold as it did.
He wrote that his team did not develop sufficient direct evidence — like an explicit admission or a communication with his co-conspirators — to establish that Mr. Trump had the criminal intent “to cause the full scope of the violence that occurred on Jan. 6.”
Trump was a challenging target to investigate.
In many corruption or conspiracy investigations, Mr. Smith wrote, the target of the inquiry is often able to wield influence over witnesses or to raise legal obstacles that stymie prosecutors’ ability to get evidence.
But Mr. Trump was a particularly difficult subject of investigation, Mr. Smith noted, given his “political and financial status” and his power to command attention, especially on social media.
Mr. Smith acknowledged that his team devoted enormous energy on time-consuming litigation intended to “prevent witness intimidation,” given Mr. Trump’s practice of making “extrajudicial comments — sometimes of a threatening nature — about the case.”
The special counsel’s office also engaged in more than a year of court fights stemming from Mr. Trump’s efforts to limit the scope of the investigation by repeated assertions of executive privilege. Prosecutors had to overcome those assertions to secure grand jury testimony from several major witnesses, including former Vice President Mike Pence.
The biggest legal obstacle, however, arose when the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling over the summer granting Mr. Trump a broad form of immunity from prosecution for official acts he took as president.
The ruling not only threw into doubt many of the allegations in the election interference indictment but, more important, also made it all but impossible to hold a trial on the charges before the voters went to the polls.
Smith defended his team.
In a letter accompanying his report, Mr. Smith made a decidedly personal defense of his deputies and other members of his staff. They were “people of great decency and the highest personal integrity” who endured not only “intense public scrutiny” during the case, but also “threats to their safety and relentless unfounded attacks on their character,” he wrote.
From the moment Mr. Smith assumed his job as special counsel, Mr. Trump assailed him on social media and at campaign events, relentlessly describing him as “deranged” and as a “thug.”
The special counsel was ultimately forced to travel with a detail of bodyguards when he appeared in public. Last Christmas, someone called the police near his home in Maryland and filed a false report that he had shot his wife in what the authorities later described as an attempted “swatting” incident.
Mr. Smith’s praise for his team came as Mr. Trump has renewed his attacks and is poised to re-enter the White House. That has raised concerns that Mr. Trump or top officials in his Justice Department — two of whom are expected to be his own former criminal defense lawyers — could use their power to go after Mr. Smith or his subordinates.
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