With the public release of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report to Attorney General Merrick Garland, the saga of Donald Trump’s federal prosecution for election interference has come to an end, less than a week before he’s sworn in to a second term. That it was short-circuited before trial is partly the fault of Garland, who waited nearly two years after the horrific Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a Trump-stoked mob to appoint Smith.

Trump escaped the conviction that Smith believes was certain by beating the clock. Smith and his team of seasoned career prosecutors argue in the report that until Trump’s 2024 election victory forced the case’s dismissal that they had strong enough evidence to convict the former president for his attempts to invalidate the 2020 election.

This was no secret offense. Trump’s was a very public campaign to overturn the election results. While he and allies did engage in what are now well-documented behind-the-scenes conspiracies — including ideas like seizing voting machines or getting state officials to manufacture votes for him — the then-president was also quite vocal about his view that the election had been stolen from him and that this supporters and allies should do something about this, up to and including his encouragement to violence in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

This is of course a bit bewildering to read at a time when Trump is days away from being sworn in as president again and no longer facing any of these federal criminal charges, having entirely avoided concrete consequences for his misconduct, not only on this but mishandling classified documents. There are a lot of culprits here, starting with his own craven party, whose leaders ever so briefly repudiated the wannabe authoritarian in the immediate aftermath of the riot only to punt on the question of accountability by failing to convict Trump during his Senate impeachment for his election interference, saying the question should be resolved in the courts.

That court outcome, of real accountability in the criminal justice system, would have been more likely if those in charge of our federal law enforcement had moved with all due haste to hold this historically malfeasant chief executive responsible. Instead, Garland appointed Smith on Nov. 18, 2022, two years after Trump started undermining Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. It wasn’t going to be enough time for complex investigation, indictment and trial.

Paired with the sleight of hand of Trump-friendly jurists on the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts, who manufactured legal principles like near-total presidential immunity and threw up other roadblocks, the case never even made it to trial, where the public could have seen prosecutors lay out their case against Trump and, if Smith’s contention is correct, won a conviction of a much more serious caliber than the Manhattan hush money case.

This process has been a percolating in the news and political sphere for so long that the significance of the underlying acts has dulled in the public consciousness, but let’s restate plainly what we’re talking about here: a now-incoming U.S. president — tasked then with upholding our laws and preserving the centuries-old system of peaceful transfer of power that has characterized this nation and enabled its prosperity and stability — tried to overthrow our system. Ultimately, he got away with it, through the failure of every system meant to hold him accountable.

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