I agree with Special Counsel Jack Smith: DONALD JOHN TRUMP would have been convicted if there had been a trial in the election interference case. From The Washington Post:
Justice Dept. releases Trump special counsel report on Jan. 6 case
President-elect Donald Trump has tried to prevent the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report before he takes office next week.
If Donald Trump didn’t win the presidential election in November, the Justice Department had ample evidence to convict him at trial of trying to obstruct the 2020 election results, special counsel Jack Smith said in a report released early Tuesday morning.
Justice Department regulations prohibit the prosecution of a sitting president, but Smith emphasized in his report that dropping the case does not make the crimes that prosecutors allege that Trump committed any less serious.
“The Department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a President is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Office stands fully behind,” the report reads. “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.”
The lengthy document was released after a week-long legal battle, as Trump attempted to prevent the material from reaching the public before he is sworn in for a second term as president next week.
A federal court has blocked for now the release of a second volume of the report that details Smith’s separate investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and obstruction of government efforts to retrieve them. Even before that court order, Attorney General Merrick Garland had agreed to keep the volume under wraps while litigation in the case continues.
The election-interference investigation examined Trump’s efforts to question the election results in specific swing states, encourage alternate slates of electors, pressure his vice president not to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and encourage his supporters to protest what he falsely claimed was a rigged election.
In August 2023, the special counsel secured a grand jury indictment of Trump on four federal charges related to overturning the election results, alleging that he conspired to defraud the country by depriving citizens of having their votes counted and obstructed an official proceeding.
Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges and his lawyers filed appeal after appeal to delay a potential trial. The proceedings were paused for months when the Supreme Court took up Trump’s question of whether a president’s immunity from criminal prosecution extends to the actions alleged in the indictment.
In an explosive ruling, the justices largely sided with Trump, dramatically expanding the scope of presidential immunity. That decision prompted the Justice Department to file a whittled down indictment, stripped of evidence and allegations related to the president’s core constitutional powers, such as his oversight of the Justice Department, but bolstered to argue that other official acts were taken as a private candidate seeking office and therefore not immune from prosecution.
The parties were in the process of litigating what allegations could be included in the indictment when Trump won the November election. That meant the case would be dismissed. But under Justice Department regulations, the special counsel still needed to complete a report. And last week, Smith submitted the report to Garland, who then sent it to Congress and decided to release it to the public.
The report details the pressure campaign Trump allegedly waged in swing states, contacting state lawmakers and leaders and urging them “take action to ignore the vote counts.”
“Significantly, he made election claims only to state legislators and executives who shared his political affiliation and were his political supporters, and only in states that he had lost,” the report says.
Soon after narrowly losing Arizona, for example, Trump and lawyer Rudy Giuliani sought to convince then-Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers to aid them. According to the report -- and Bowers’s previous public statements -- the president and Giuliani “used false fraud claims to try to convince the Speaker to call the state legislature into session and replace Arizona’s legitimate electors with Mr. Trump’s illegitimate ones.”
Bowers asked the men to give him evidence of vast fraud or voting by noncitizens, but the evidence never came — and Bowers refused to go along.
In early January 2021, days before Congress was to certify the election results, the report said, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and implored him to “find 11,780 votes” -- Biden’s margin of victory in the state. Trump continued to press state and GOP officials, the report said, in Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere.
He “engaged in these efforts even though trusted state and party officials had told him from the outset that there was no evidence of fraud in the election,” the special counsel wrote.
Smith also submitted to Garland the second volume of the report detailing his findings in the classified documents case, which was dismissed by Cannon last summer after she ruled that Smith was unlawfully appointed. The Justice Department is appealing that ruling but has dropped Trump as a party in the case because of his election, keeping his two co-defendants and longtime employees, Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.
Nauta and De Oliveira joined Trump in fighting the release of the special counsel report, saying they could be unfairly prejudiced if that classified documents portion is made public and the case against them is later resurrected by an appeals court. Cannon scheduled a hearing Friday to hear their concerns and said she would decide the fate of the classified documents volume after that.
Garland has said he does not intend to publicly release that report while there is ongoing litigation against the co-defendants. But he said he wants to transmit the report to select leaders in Congress if they agree to not make it public.
Trump’s attorneys, in aletter to the attorney general that was also released Tuesday by the Justice Department, attacked Smith as an “out-of-control private citizen unconstitutionally posing as a prosecutor” and said his report peddled “false and discredited accusations.”
They urged Garland not to make the report public, saying it would interfere with Trump’s transition – an argument they’ve since unsuccessfully pursued in court.
Smith, in a response to that letter also released Tuesday, noted that despite their bluster, Trump’s attorneys had not raised any specific factual objections to the special counsel’s findings. He called their arguments for suppressing its public release “disingenuous.”
In a separate letter to Garland accompanying his report, Smith balked at repeated assertions by Trump and his allies that politics had tainted the special counsel team’s prosecutorial decisions.
“My Office had one north star: to follow the facts and law wherever they led. Nothing more and nothing less," he wrote. “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.”
This is a developing story. It will be updated with more details from Smith’s report.
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