Trump Would Have Been Convicted for Election Interference, Says Jack Smith

In the time between his two presidential administrations, Donald Trump was famously the subject of four separate criminal indictments, two of which were spearheaded by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Given that Trump will soon be in charge of the Department of Justice, Smith ended both cases in November. This week, Smith’s report pertaining to Trump’s conduct after losing the 2020 election was released. Much of the information was already in the public domain, but even so, the evidence laid out is particularly damning and paints a portrait of an unhinged executive using any possible maneuver to stay in power.

Within hours of the polls closing in 2020, Trump cried foul, insisting he had won the election outright and that any further vote counting was evidence of fraud. In the weeks thereafter, he filed dozens of lawsuits and cozied up to whomever espoused the looniest theories to explain his loss. He leaned on officials in states he lost to interfere in the process of counting and ratifying vote totals. These efforts came to a head on January 6, 2021, when hundreds of supporters—fired up by Trump at a rally near the White House—stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the election for Joe Biden.

In 2023, Smith empaneled a grand jury and secured an indictment against Trump on four federal charges related to obstructing an official proceeding. In his final report, Smith does not mince words on Trump’s criminal culpability, finding that Trump “willfully caused others to attempt to obstruct the certification proceeding on January 6.”

“But for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency,” Smith concluded, “the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”

Trump’s best defense in the case has always been ignorance—that against evidence to the contrary, he truly believed he had legitimately won the 2020 election before nefarious actors stole it away. In that scenario, Trump was not attempting to steal an election, he was merely “restoring faith and confidence in American elections,” as he said in a lengthy Facebook video after the election.

Smith’s report is unsparing in its determination that Trump knew what he was doing all along. “Evidence from a variety of sources established that Mr. Trump knew that there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, that many of the specific claims he made were untrue, and that he had lost the election,” Smith found. “He knew this because some of the highest-ranking officials in his own Administration, including the Vice President, told him directly that there was no evidence to support his claims.”

When Trump reached out to state officials about interfering on his behalf, several of them also “rebuffed him and informed him that his fraud claims were wrong, both privately and through public statements.” Besides, the report notes, Trump appealed “only to state legislators and executives who shared his political affiliation and were his political supporters, and only in states that he had lost.”

Even if Trump did somehow believe the nonsense he was saying, the report finds, his own words undermined his case: “Mr. Trump and co-conspirators could not have believed the specific fraud claims that they were making because the numbers they touted—for instance, of dead voters in a particular state—frequently vacillated wildly from day to day or were objectively impossible.”

Truly, while the report includes little new information, the case it paints is damning, both in how Trump ignored evidence contradicting his viewpoint and how little effort he expended toward quelling violence committed on his behalf. “Mr. Trump’s words inspired his supporters to commit acts of physical violence,” the report found, and “the people who took Mr. Trump at his word formed a massive crowd that broke onto restricted Capitol grounds and into the building, violently attacking law enforcement officers protecting the Capitol and those inside.”

Smith also notes that Trump “continu[es] to support and ally himself with the people who attacked the Capitol.” Indeed, Trump has repeatedly pledged to pardon the rioters when back in office.

After the report’s release, Trump lashed out on social media. “Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden,” he wrote in a late-night post on Truth Social. “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”

“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,” Smith wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland included with the report.

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