In a 174-page report, Special Counsel Jack Smith has detailed Donald Trump’s “unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results” of the 2020 Presidential election.

The summary of the investigation was released on Tuesday morning, after Judge Aileen Cannon finally agreed to its publication. Cannon, a Trump appointee, continued to bar publication of the report over Trump’s alleged theft of classified documents from the White House.

Smith’s report summarizes:

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.

This included attempts to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force Justice Department officials and his own Vice President, Michael R. Pence, to act in contravention of their oaths and to instead advance Mr. Trump’s personal interests; and, on January 6, 2021, to direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters’ violence to further delay it.

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Smith concludes, “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 Criminal Plot

Much of the detail in Smith’s report has been revealed in the years since the 2020 election and Trump’s “criminal acts” leading up to the January 6, 2021 attack by his supporters on the US Capitol. But the Special Counsel’s careful delineation assembles and analyzes those facts to build the case for the indictments and the potential trial.

The report documents “dozens of specific claims” by Trump of a fraudulent vote, even though “evidence from a variety of sources established that Mr. Trump knew that there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, that many of the specific claims he made were untrue, and that he had lost the election”.

Smith explains, “He knew this because some of the highest-ranking officials in his own Administration, including the Vice President, told him directly that there was no evidence to support his claims.”

Despite this, Trump and several co-conspirators, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, used false claims to pressure State governors and legislatures to overturn their electoral results. They built slates of “false electors” in seven states which they had lost, trying to send them to Washington in place of the legitimate electors for Joe Biden. They tried to install a Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, as Attorney General to “find” fraud and declare the election invalid.

When these efforts, and when Vice President Pence refused to block the certification of Biden as President-elect, Trump “made one more attempt to retain power”. In his speech in front of the White House on January 6, 2021, “Trump gave his supporters false hope that through” a march on the Capitol and the threat of violence, “they could cause Mr. Pence to overturn the election results”.

From the White House Dining Room, Trump watched the unfolding attack and refused — despite the entreaties of his staff — to intervene by calling on his supporters to withdraw. Instead, he “issued two Tweets falsely suggesting that events at the Capitol were ‘peaceful'”.

Even after the riot was quelled, Trump tried that evening to block Biden’s certification, trying to reach two senators and directing Giuliani to call other members of Congress. When the White House Counsel asked Trump to withdraw any objections to the certification, he refused.

Smith summarizes:

Based on the above facts, and after analyzing the relevant criminal statutes, the Office sought, and a grand jury found probable cause for, an indictment of Mr. Trump on four federal charges: conspiring to obstruct the governmental function of selecting and certifying the President of the United States; obstructing and attempting to obstruct the official proceeding on January 6, 2021; conspiring to obstruct the official proceeding; and conspiring to violate the federal rights of citizens to vote and have their votes counted.

When the US Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision last July 1 gave Trump partial immunity from prosecution, Smith’s office re-evaluated the evidence and concluded that Trump’s “non-immune conduct — either his private conduct as a candidate or official conduct for which the Office could rebut the presumption of immunity — violated federal law.”