In his final report, released early on Tuesday, special counsel Jack Smith claimed Donald Trump's 2024 election victory is what kept him from being convicted in the 2020 election interference case.

Key Details: In the 170-page report. Smith said prosecutors believed they had enough admissible evidence to sustain a conviction. Smith's investigation found the mainstay of Trump's supposed criminal activities was deceit, making knowingly false claims of 2020 election fraud to undermine a fundamental function of the federal government and the American democratic process. Trump, who had been indicted in 2023 on charges of striving to overturn the election, saw his case delayed by appeals and then largely dropped by a conservative-majority Supreme Court, which ruled for the first time that former presidents have broad immunity from legal prosecution for official acts. Upon the report release, Trump immediately declared on Truth Social that he was “totally innocent." The special counsel’s indictment was dismissed entirely in November due to a long-standing Justice Department policy that a sitting president cannot face federal prosecution. 

Key Quote: "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, which the office stands fully behind," Smith wrote in the report.

How The Media Covered It: Just The News (Lean Right bias) noted that Smith alleged in the report that Trump “inspired his supporters to commit acts of physical violence" on January 6 even though Trump gave a speech that day explicitly urging his followers to protest peacefully. The New York Times (Lean Left bias) found that the report amounted to an "extraordinary rebuke of a president-elect, capping a momentous legal saga that saw the man now poised to regain the powers of the nation’s highest office charged with crimes that struck at the heart of American democracy."

An editor revised and published this summary with the help of AllSides AI.