Donald Trump
fought tooth and nail to try to block the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s findings, but the president-elect's efforts fell short: The Justice Department has, in fact,
released the prosecutor’s final report on Trump’s election interference case, and the full document is
now available to the public.
When it became clear that Mr. Trump had lost the election and that lawful means of challenging the election results had failed, he resorted to a series of criminal efforts to retain power,” the report argues.
Because Justice Department guidelines prohibit prosecuting a sitting president, Smith’s criminal case against Trump will not be adjudicated, at least not for the next four years. The prosecutor nevertheless concluded in his findings that had he been able to proceed with the case, Smith and his team would’ve prevailed.
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, Smith’s report added.
The former defendant did not take the news especially well. At 1:41 a.m. local time, the president-elect published
this message to his social media platform.
Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his “boss,” Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another “Report” based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were. 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 the extent that reality still has meaning, Trump’s reaction to the release of Jack Smith's report (which he heavily contested was utterly incoherent and divorced from basic facts. To hear the Republican tell it, Smith worked for President Joe Biden, which wasn’t the case. As far as the president-elect is concerned, the special counsel wrote a report because he couldn’t proceed with his prosecution, but that was wrong, too: As
NBC News recently explained, the Justice Department’s special counsel regulations
required Smith to file a report to the attorney general “explaining his charging decisions before he steps down.”
Trump argued that the special counsel’s investigation was based on the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee’s findings (they weren’t), that the former House select panel “illegally” destroyed evidence (it didn’t), and that House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi was “completely guilty” of some unidentified crimes (she wasn’t).
The president-elect concluded that he won a second term “in a landslide” (he didn’t), adding that American voters “have spoken” — which is true, though not at all relevant in this context, since the electorate’s verdict was not directly related to the defendant’s criminal indictment.
For good measure, 11 minutes after his initial online rant — at nearly 2 a.m. local time — Trump kept going. “To show you how desperate Deranged Jack Smith is, he released his Fake findings at 1:00 A.M. in the morning,”
he wrote.
But Smith’s findings weren’t “fake,” and it was the Justice Department, not the prosecutor, who was responsible for releasing his report. What’s more, the timing of the release wasn’t evidence of a “deranged” process, it was simply when it was legally permissible to make the information available to the public.
For the sake of context, let’s not forget that the president-elect had plenty of time to prepare a response to this report. Indeed, Trump’s own lawyers were able to
review a draft of Smith’s findings the weekend of Jan. 4, giving their client more than a week to craft a carefully worded reaction to the document.
The best the Republican could come up with, evidently, was a couple of clumsily worded middle-of-the-night tweets filled with transparent lies and falsehoods — which says quite a bit about the merits of his defense.
As for Smith’s
other final report, related to Trump’s classified documents scandal, it’s still
caught up in legal limbo, though it, too, might yet see the light of day.
