Special counsel Jack Smith report says Trump would've been convicted in Jan. 6 election interference case

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News on Jan 14, 2025

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President-elect Donald Trump would have been tried and convicted of election interference in the federal Jan. 6 case if he hadn’t escaped prosecution by winning reelection, special counsel Jack Smith said in his final report released after midnight Tuesday.

“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 wrote in the 137-page report.

The veteran prosecutor scorched Trump for lying, cheating and engineering an “unprecedented” conspiracy aimed at overturning his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden in the report that was released by Attorney General Merrick Garland shortly after a court-ordered delay expired at midnight.

“Trump’s unprecedented efforts to unlawfully retain power after losing the 2020 election … compelled prosecution,” Smith wrote. “Trump’s cases represented ones ‘in which the offense [was] the most flagrant, the public harm the greatest, and the proof the most certain,'” he added, quoting a federal guideline for prosecutors.

The report mostly rehashed information included in previous court documents, especially the historic 2023 indictment of Trump that accused him of defrauding the U.S. and depriving Americans of their right to have their votes counted.

But Smith also had some choice words for the once and future president.

“The throughline of all of Mr. Trump’s criminal efforts was deceit,” Smith wrote. “Trump used those lies as a weapon to defeat a function foundational to United States democracy.”

He dismissed Trump’s oft-repeated claim that Biden or his Democratic allies directed the probe as “in a word, laughable.”

Smith said the decision to charge Trump was his alone and staked his professional reputation on the move.

“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,” he wrote. “After nearly 30 years of public service, that is a choice I could not abide.”

Trump wasted no time trashing Smith as “deranged, desperate” and deriding the report as “his fake findings.”

The president-elect, who returns to office on Monday, questioned why the report was released after midnight even though the timing was determined by a federal judge’s now-expired order delaying it for three days.

“Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “The voters have spoken!!!”

Smith submitted his report to the Department of Justice on Jan. 7, and resigned last Friday ahead of its release.

Trump had threatened to fire Smith “within seconds” of retaking power.

In the report, Smith detailed Trump’s alleged plot including a push to get state lawmakers to overturn his losses in some battleground states, pressuring the Justice Department to probe bogus fraud claims, and his speech ginning up his angry supporters to attack the Capitol at a Jan. 6, 2021 rally.

Smith explained that he didn’t seek to charge Trump with violating the insurrection act because there wasn’t enough case law and precedent to support an indictment.

He asserted that most but not all of the case survived despite the Supreme Court’s surprising ruling last summer that granted Trump significant immunity for official acts taken while serving in the White House. The prosecutor said most of Trump’s crimes were carried out in his private capacity as a candidate for reelection, not his official role as president.

Smith compiled two volumes of the report, one on the election interference case and the second on his improperly taking hundreds of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving office in 2021.

Garland ordered the classified documents report sealed for now because a case might still proceed against two of Trump’s co-defendants. Federal Judge Aileen Cannon has also ordered its release blocked pending a hearing Friday.