Jack Smith wrote that Donald Trump would have been convicted had the case been allowed to proceed and explained why he didn’t pursue charges of incitement of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
The Justice Department released a 137-page volume early Tuesday morning laying out the details of the investigation that the former special counsel Jack Smith conducted into President-elect Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
The release of the report, which Mr. Trump’s legal team had vehemently fought, is likely to be the Justice Department’s final word on the attempt to use the legal system to hold Mr. Trump accountable for conspiring to subvert the election results. Because Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, prosecutors were forced under a binding Justice Department policy to drop the case against him.
Criminal investigators, the report said, interviewed more than 250 people and obtained grand jury testimony from more than 55 witnesses — some after lengthy battles over executive privilege. Mr. Smith said the work of the House committee that separately examined the Capitol attack was only “a small part of the office’s investigative record.”
Mr. Smith wrote a second volume about separate charges he filed accusing Mr. Trump of refusing to give back troves of classified documents after leaving office in 2021. That volume remains out of the public eye for now because remnants of that case are still active against two Trump aides charged as co-conspirators.
Here are four takeaways from the election case volume.
Smith said Trump would have been convicted at trial.
In what amounted to his report’s most important finding, Mr. Smith asserted he was confident that his team of prosecutors and investigators had amassed enough evidence to convict Mr. Trump had the case been allowed to go to trial.
The report spent nearly 30 pages recounting the details of how Mr. Trump engaged in multiple criminal conspiracies. Much of that was already in public view through the indictment in the case and a lengthy evidentiary memo that Mr. Smith filed in October as part of the fallout from the Supreme Court’s ruling that Mr. Trump enjoyed presumptive immunity for his official acts as president.