Special counsel Jack Smith stands behind Trump election case he dropped

The Department of Justice early Tuesday released its long-awaited election interference report against President-elect Donald Trump, after a protracted legal fight.

Prosecutors dropped the two federal criminal cases against Trump after he won the 2024 election, and the final report by Special Counsel Jack Smith is their last chance to explain their decisions.

Smith, in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland prefacing the report, defended his work and his team, as well as his impartiality in pursuing the federal cases against Trump, whom prosecutors ended up charging with election interference in Washington, D.C., and with hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort and refusing to return them to the FBI.

The report says the evidence would have led to Trump’s conviction at trial, “but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency.” Longstanding Justice Department policy prohibits prosecuting a sitting president.

Smith said he fully stood behind the decision to bring the cases: “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. After nearly 30 years of public service, that is a choice I could not abide.”

The 137-page report lays out prosecutors’ evidence of Trump’s efforts to influence the election and propagate election claims he knew were false.

Florida district judge Aileen Cannon on Monday paved the way for the DOJ to release the first part of Smith’s inquiry into Trump, covering the investigation and four felony charges against him tied to the 2020 presidential election. Cannon denied a motion by Trump’s former co-defendants who sought to block the release.

The DOJ agreed not to publicly release volume two of its report, about the classified documents case, to avoid interfering with an ongoing case against two other defendants. But it wanted to release the first volume, covering the investigation and charges against Trump tied to the 2020 presidential election.

Smith submitted his report to the DOJ on Jan. 7, and resigned on Jan. 10, as had been expected.

Trump has argued the special counsel was appointed unlawfully, and that any public report would be legally invalid and hurt his transition into the White House. He has sought to intervene in the Florida case to block the report’s release, and had threatened to fire Smith once he’s inaugurated on Jan. 20.

“Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social after the report’s release.

Smith strongly defended the report’s work, and emphasized that the DOJ never sought to interfere in it.

“To all who know me well, the claim from Mr. Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable,” he wrote.

“I can assure you that neither l nor the prosecutors on my team would have tolerated or taken part in any action by our Office for partisan political purposes. My Office had one north star: to follow the facts and law wherever they led. Nothing more and nothing less.”