Donald Trump Would Be Convicted of Defrauding U.S. in 2020 Election if He Weren't President-Elect, DOJ Asserts

Mar. 15, 2025

President Donald Trump at the White House in 2020.Photo: Erin Schaff - Pool/Getty

The Justice Department’sfinal reportabout the election subversion case againstDonald Trumpwas released on Tuesday, Jan. 14, revealing new details about how the 45th president allegedly tried clinging to power after losing reelection in 2020.

“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 report stated.

The more than 137-page report claimed that Trump “resorted to a series of criminal efforts to retain power” after he had lost the 2020 election toJoe Biden. This included “attempts to induce state officials to ignore” vote counts and to “force” his vice president at the time,Mike Pence,and other justice department officials to “act in contravention of their oaths” and “advance” Trump’s “personal interests.”

The report also claimed that Trump worked with others to “overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office” and even inspired his supporters to “commit acts of physical violence” on Jan. 6, 2021, in order “to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters' violence to further delay it.”

In the report, Smith alleged that Trump perpetuated “false” claims that “dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters” had cast ballots against him and that voting machines changed people’s votes against him, despite high ranking officials in his administration telling him directly “that there was no evidence to support his claims.”

Smith said that he stood “fully” behind his decision to prosecute Trump in the report, adding, “to have done otherwise on the facts developed during our work would have been to shirk my duties as a prosecutor and a public servant.”

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Trump fired back after the release of the report on his social media platformTruth Social, writing, “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide.”

Former special counsel Jack Smith filed his final reports before resigning from the Justice Department on Friday, Jan. 10.MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty

MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty

As special counsel, Smith was tasked with overseeing exhaustive federal investigations into Trump, which resulted in two separate criminal cases. The first was related toTrump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results— including his actions leading up tothe deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot— and the second case addressedhis handling of classified White House documentsthat were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago.

Though Trump ultimately evaded his federal criminal charges, outgoing Attorney General Merrick Garland recently asserted that the public has a right to know what was in Smith’s report about Trump.

In the name of transparency, Garland has been on a mission to release all special counsel reports that were filed during his tenure. He did make one exception, agreeing to withhold the details about Trump’s classified documents investigation for now, sincehis co-defendants in that caseare still facing trial.

source: people.com