(Washington) United States President-elect Donald Trump would have been convicted for his alleged attempt to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election if he had not been re-elected four years later, says special prosecutor Jack Smith in a damning report which provoked the fury of the future tenant of the White House on Tuesday.
“Had it not been for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the (special prosecutor’s) office believed the evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.” , indicates the report published Tuesday by the American media.
The report recalls that “the Constitution prohibits the indictment and prosecution of a president”, a principle which “does not depend on the seriousness of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s evidence or the merits of the prosecution” .
Donald Trump, who will return to the White House on January 20, was prosecuted in the investigation into the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 by his supporters in Washington to contest the election of Joe Biden for president.
Jack Smith, the special prosecutor appointed to lead this investigation, dropped the federal criminal case against the future president after his victory in the November 2024 presidential election.
“Disturbed”
Shortly after the publication of the report on the night of Monday to Tuesday, Donald Trump reacted in a virulent message on his Truth Social platform, calling Mr. Smith “disturbed”.
“Dangerous Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute his “boss” political adversary, Corrupt Joe Biden. So he ended up writing yet another “report” based on information” that a group of “corrupt politicians and thugs illegally destroyed and deleted, because it showed how totally innocent I was,” the message said.
PHOTO JEENAH MOON, REUTERS ARCHIVES
President-elect Donald Trump
“To show you how desperate Deranged Jack Smith is, he published his false conclusions at 1 a.m.,” the president-elect added in another message.
Mr. Smith’s report details Mr. Trump’s alleged efforts to persuade state-level Republican elected officials and leaders to “change the results” of the 2020 election.
“Mr. Trump contacted elected officials and state officials, pressured them with false claims of election fraud in their states, and urged them to take action to ignore the vote count and change the results,” according to the report, which was posted online by the New York Times and the Washington Post.
“It is important to note” that he spoke “only to elected officials and state officials who shared his political affiliation and were his supporters, and only in states he had lost,” the report added.
Furthermore, the text claims that Trump and his co-conspirators had planned to make “fraudulent certificates” of voters in seven states where he had lost: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico , Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The special counsel’s office concludes that “Trump’s conduct violated multiple federal criminal statutes.”
Federal Judge Aileen Cannon, appointed by Mr. Trump, last year dismissed a separate case against him over his handling of top secret documents after he left the White House, but charges are still pending against two of his former co-defendants.
Special Prosecutor Smith left the Justice Department last week, days after submitting his final report.
In another case, Donald Trump was officially exempted from sentence by a judge on January 10 in the case of hidden payments to an porn star, a symbolic sanction, but historic in the sense that it made him the first president United States designee criminally convicted.
