Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith’s scathing report on Donald Trump’s determined efforts to upend the 2020 presidential election was released after midnight on Tuesday and insists that the evidence against him was strong enough to “obtain and sustain a conviction” for election interference had he not become president-elect in November.
The 45th president “inspired his supporters to commit acts of physical violence” on January 6 2021 when they stormed the US Capitol by knowingly spread a false narrative about election fraud in the 2020 election, which was won by his Democratic rival Joe Biden, Smith determined in the final report on his investigation.
“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 174-page report concludes.
In different sections, Smith’s findings discuss Trump putting “pressure on state officials”, as well as on his own deputy Mike Pence to weaponize his ceremonial role in certifying the election results in Congress and also discusses the so-called fraudulent electors plan.
“When it became clear that Mr Trump had lost the election and that lawful means of challenging the election results had failed, he resorted to a series of criminal efforts to retain power”, Smith wrote.
Those included, according to the special counsel, “attempts to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force Justice Department officials and his own vice president, Michael R Pence, to act in contravention of their oaths and to instead advance Mr Trump’s personal interests”.
Smith reveals the intensity of Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence, alleging that, at one stage, the president told his running mate that “hundreds of thousands” of people would “hate his guts” and think him “stupid” if he did not comply with his plans, also angrily rebuking Pence for being “too honest”.
Trump, who takes office as America’s 47th president on January 20, has not been exonerated for his “unprecedented criminal effort” to subvert the 2020 vote, the report flatly states.
In response, the president-elect took to his Truth Social platform to blast Smith as “deranged” in two separate messages.
Trump accused the former special prosecutor of only publishing the report because he could not bring a successful prosecution.
He said the document in question was “based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED”.
Referring to the bipartisan House select committee led by Representative Bennie Thompson that investigated the effort to subvert the 2020 result, Trump alleges the panel destroyed evidence because it showed how “totally innocent” he was but provided no evidence to support the claim.
“Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” he added.
In a subsequent message, Trump insisted again that “the Unselect Committee illegally destroyed and deleted all of the evidence”, once more providing no basis for his contention.
Earlier this month, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that there would be a formal probe into the House committee in question, which prominently featured Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger among its members – a gesture widely seen as an act of retaliation on the incoming president’s behalf.
Smith, who resigned from the Justice Department on Friday, took action to drop his case against Trump in the aftermath of the latter’s November election win over Kamala Harris because of the long-standing protocol by the department not to bring charges against a sitting president.
But the special counsel steps aside with a report that makes clear his belief that Trump spread claims that were “demonstrably and, in many cases, obviously false” in the hope of seizing back the presidency four years ago.
“Trump knew that there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, that many of the specific claims that he made were untrue, and that he had lost the election,” his report adds.
In a letter accompanying its release, Smith also moved to defend his own integrity and that of his team.
“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,” he wrote.
“My office had one north star: to follow the facts and law wherever they led. Nothing more and nothing less.”
He branded Trump’s accusations of corruption against him and his team “laughable”.
A second volulme of Smith’s report addresses separate charges against Trump over his handling of classified documents after he left the White House following the curtailment of his first term.
That volume was not released because charges against two of Trump’s co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, are still pending, even though charges were dropped against the president-elect himself.
Trump’s team of lawyers scrambled shortly before Smith’s election interference report was released to attempt again to block it, but failed.
Source: independent.co.uk