Attorney General Merrick Garland submitted to Congress on Tuesday a portion of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report, in which the prosecutor asserted that he would have secured a conviction against President-elect Donald Trump had he not won the election. This statement, included in the report, provides insight into Smith’s position regarding the case and the potential legal outcomes that were considered during the investigation. The report outlines the special counsel’s findings and perspective, though it remains a subject of debate and interpretation within legal circles.
”Indeed, 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,” the 170-page report stated. The release of the report came days after Trump was unable to convince multiple courts to block its publication, and just hours after a separate special counsel, David Weiss, issued his own report accusing President Joe Biden of misleading the American public about the reasons behind his son Hunter Biden’s prosecution for gun and tax crimes.
In the report, Smith alleged that Trump “inspired his supporters to commit acts of physical violence” on January 6, despite the fact that Trump delivered a speech that day explicitly urging his followers to protest peacefully. The prosecutor also claimed that Trump encouraged his supporters to challenge the 2020 election results by knowingly and falsely asserting that voter fraud had occurred. “Trump knew that there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, that many of the specific claims that he made were untrue, and that he had lost the election,” Smith alleged.
Trump took to his social media platform Truth Social to immediately contest the report. “To show you how desperate Deranged Jack Smith is, he released his Fake findings at 1:00 A.M. in the morning,” Trump wrote. “Did he say that the Unselect Committee illegally destroyed and deleted all of the evidence.” That said, given that the first trial was going to be held in Washington, D.C., most honest observers would have said there’s no way he could have gotten a fair verdict in a city that is 95 percent Democrat.