Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted President-elect Donald J. Trump on charges of illegally seeking to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a final report released early Tuesday that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Mr. Trump in a trial, had his 2024 election victory not made it impossible for the prosecution to continue.

Attorney General Merrick Garland submitted to Congress early Tuesday a portion of Special Counsel Jack Smith's final report in which the prosecutor boasted he would’ve secured Donald Trump’s conviction if the President-elect had not won the election.

”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.

Special counsel Jack Smith defended his decision to bring charges against Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, writing in a report made public early Tuesday that prosecutors believed they had enough evidence to convict him had they not been forced to drop the case after his re-election in November.

Donald Trump has not been exonerated for his “unprecedented criminal effort” to subvert the 2020 election and cling to power after he lost to Joe Biden.

That’s the message special counsel Jack Smith delivered in his final report, which laid out evidence Smith said would have resulted in Trump’s conviction at trial. Trump is only off the hook, the special counsel wrote, because he won back the White House in 2024, forcing the Justice Department to shut down the historic prosecution.

Special counsel Jack Smith defended his investigations into President-elect Trump in a final report released publicly early Tuesday morning, saying his determinations were free from political interference and that, if permitted to proceed, his cases would have likely secured a conviction.

Smith made the claims both in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and in the much awaited release of the election interference volume of his final report.

Parts of it dropped in the early morning hours, though this was expected as liberals want these details released before the January 20 inauguration. There’s been a tussle over the report filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who resigned like a scared wombat over the weekend because he knows he has no future in a Trump-led Department of Justice. It’s an institution about to get a face lift and then some.  

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Special Counsel Jack Smith resigned Friday from the Department of Justice as President-elect Donald Trump and others continued efforts to block the release of Smith’s final report on his criminal investigations of the Republican.

Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022, left his post 10 days before Trump’s inauguration.

Attorney General Merrick Garland told Congress he plans to make special counsel Jack Smith’s report on the cases against Donald Trump available to committee leaders and, ultimately, the public, once courts allow, marking the formal end of Smith’s office.

Garland noted he believes even the part of the report about the classified documents case should be public someday.

The Justice Department said Wednesday that it intends to release special counsel Jack Smith’s findings on Donald Trump’s efforts to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election but will keep under wraps for now the rest of the report focused on the president-elect’s hoarding of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.