Trump has not been exonerated, special counsel Jack Smith declares in final report
Donald Trump has not been exonerated for his “unprecedented criminal effort” to subvert the 2020 election and cling to power after he lost to Joe Biden.
That’s the message special counsel Jack Smith delivered in his final report, which laid out evidence Smith said would have resulted in Trump’s conviction at trial. Trump is only off the hook, the special counsel wrote, because he won back the White House in 2024, forcing the Justice Department to shut down the historic prosecution.
“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,” Smith wrote in a 137-page volume of the report that the Justice Department sent to Congress and publicly released on Tuesday morning, shortly after midnight.
“The admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction,” added Smith, who resigned from his position last week.
The Justice Department is withholding for now, under court order, the second part of Smith’s two-volume report. That portion details his investigation into the presence of a slew of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and allegations that he obstructed the investigation into how they got there.
The volume on the election case summarizes the trove of evidence that federal investigators collected during a probe that lasted years but never came close to reaching trial. Much of that evidence has been made public in indictments and court filings over the course of Smith’s two-year tenure. The report draws from 250 interviews his staff conducted, as well as information gleaned from 55 grand jury witnesses and transcripts from congressional investigations.
Smith obtained reams of records, including Signal messages between one of Trump’s alleged co-conspirators — former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark — and Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), a top Trump ally in Congress.
The report describes a multifaceted scheme, orchestrated by Trump, to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election. That plan, Smith said, included spreading false claims of election fraud to drive up public distrust in the results. Trump then used that sentiment to lean on GOP allies in statehouses and Congress — as well as his own vice president — to help him corrupt the results, the report says.
As part of that effort, Trump and several alleged co-conspirators urged GOP activists in various states that Trump lost to sign false documents claiming to be legitimate presidential electors. Smith argued that many of those false electors were deceived by Trump and his allies, believing they were acting as a fail-safe in case Trump prevailed in any of his legal challenges to the election. Instead, Trump and his alleged co-conspirators used the false electors’ signed certificates as the linchpin of their efforts to disrupt Congress’ certification of the election results on Jan. 6, 2021.
A late-night release, and a taunt from Trump
The unusual overnight release of the first volume of the report followed last-ditch legal maneuvering by Trump on Monday night seeking to persuade U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to keep the entire report secret.
As the Florida-based Trump appointee denied Trump’s last-ditch bid, she wrote in a brief order that she only had authority to act in connection with the classified-documents case that she previously presided over. She lacked the power, she acknowledged, to dictate what the Justice Department made public about the 2020 election-focused case brought in Washington.
“The Court is therefore constrained to deny the present request for emergency relief,” Cannon wrote in an order issued after 11 p.m. Monday.
An earlier order from Cannon that had temporarily blocked the public release of all of the report expired at midnight, and the Justice Department quickly released the first volume. But the department remains blocked from disseminating the second volume, on the classified documents case.
Trump has railed against the planned release of the report in recent days, pillorying Smith for unleashing a written attack on him after failing to get either criminal case to trial.
“Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” Trump wrote in an early-morning taunt Tuesday on social media. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”
In a letter accompanying the report, Smith directly challenged Trump’s repeated claims that the election case ended in his “complete exoneration.”
“That is false,” the special counsel wrote.
Responding to critics on the left
The report also serves as a rebuttal to sharp criticism Garland and Smith have faced in recent months from some legal commentators on the left who believe that the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute the former president were too plodding and allowed Trump to effectively run out the clock on the legal process.
Smith provided great detail about the efforts that prosecutors made for months to obtain evidence useful to the investigation, despite resistance from Trump and his allies. The details underscore claims by Garland’s defenders that the investigation was active earlier than many people realize.
Smith also said his own team worked at an extraordinary pace to make sure charges were ready before Trump’s reelection campaign began in earnest.
“The Office’s exceptional working pace ensured that its investigative work could be completed, charging decisions could be made, and any necessary indictments could be returned by the summer of 2023, long before the election,” Smith wrote.
A probe that predated Smith
Smith took charge of the election investigation in November 2022: He was appointed by Garland right after Trump announced his third White House bid. But even before Smith’s appointment, federal prosecutors had already begun closing in on potential charges against the former president.
As the House Jan. 6 select committee publicly aired damaging evidence about Trump’s multifaceted bid to seize power despite his defeat in the 2020 election, prosecutors blanketed his allies with subpoenas and search warrants, tightening a net around Trump that seemed to increasingly point toward a historic criminal case.
After nine months of intense, secretive court battles to force grand jury testimony from the highest levels of Trump’s orbit, including from his former vice president Mike Pence, Smith charged Trump in August 2023 with three sweeping conspiracies: seeking to deprive millions of voters of their right to vote, attempting to obstruct Congress’ role in the transfer of power, and scheming to disrupt federal election processes.
Those efforts, Smith argued, culminated in the violent mob attack by Trump supporters on the Capitol, which prosecutors said Trump attempted to exploit to make one final push to subvert the election.
The indictment landed with explosive force in Washington. Even though Trump had already been charged in two other criminal cases — including by Smith himself in the classified documents case — the election case struck at the heart of Trump’s renewed quest for power and threatened to revive liabilities that damaged Republicans’ standing in the 2022 midterms.
Instead, Trump marshaled the political energy unleashed by his mounting criminal cases and used them to consolidate the support of Republicans.
At the same time, Trump deployed his long-favored courtroom strategy: interminable delay. In the election case, Trump asserted that he was immune from Smith’s charges because he was fulfilling presidential responsibilities when he demanded that allies revisit the 2020 election results.
Though the judge presiding over the election case, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, quickly swept aside this argument, Trump’s appeals tied up the proceedings for seven more months. And they culminated with a Supreme Court ruling last July that enshrined sweeping immunity from prosecution for most of a president’s official conduct.
The ruling triggered new court battles over the details of Smith’s case, and those battles were ongoing when Trump won the 2024 election, forcing the Justice Department to end the case against him due to its longstanding policy that bars prosecutions of sitting presidents.
Last-minute wrangling over report’s release
In recent days, Smith’s final report became entangled in litigation seeking to block its release. The effort was undertaken by lawyers for Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, two former co-defendants (and current employees) of Trump in the classified documents case. Cannon dismissed that case last July, concluding that Smith’s appointment was illegal, but the Justice Department appealed that ruling — an appeal that remains pending against Nauta and De Oliveira.
Nauta and De Oliveira, whose defense is being bankrolled by Trump political committees, won an order last week from Cannon temporarily blocking release of Smith’s entire report because its release could make it harder for Nauta and De Oliveira to get a fair trial if the charges against them are revived.
But it seems highly unlikely that the prosecution of the two men will ever resume because Trump’s DOJ is expected to abandon the effort — or Trump could simply pardon them when he returns to office next week.
On Monday, Cannon agreed not to extend her block on release of the 2020-election-related part of Smith’s report, but she maintained her prohibition on the Justice Department showing the classified-document portion to anyone, including members of Congress. The Justice Department has promised not to publicly release the part of the report on the documents case out of fairness to Nauta and De Oliveira, but Garland wants to share it with leaders of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees.
Cannon set a hearing in Florida Friday afternoon to discuss DOJ’s plan and what assurances it has that information shared with Congress won’t make its way to the public.
BREAKING: DOJ Releases Jack Smith’s Report on Trump’s Efforts to Challenge the 2020 Election
Attorney General Merrick Garland has released Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on former President Donald Trump’s efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election.
The 130-page… pic.twitter.com/g9Xt50xIjn
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) January 14, 2025
