The US Department of Justice released the report by special counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday Donald Trump's Attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the most recent act by a prosecutor whose historic criminal cases were thwarted by Trump's victory in November.
The report is predicted to detail Smith's decision to file a four-count indictment against Trump, accusing the Republican president-elect of conspiring to obstruct the gathering following his loss to Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020 and certification of votes planned.
A second section of the report describes Smith's case wherein he accuses Trump of illegally storing classified national security documents after he left the White House in 2021. The Justice Department has pledged to not release this portion while the trial of two Trump associates charged within the case is underway.
Smith, who left the Justice Department last week, dropped each cases against Trump after he won the election last yr, citing a longstanding Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president. Neither of them went to trial.
Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges. Trump repeatedly called Smith “deranged” and portrayed the cases as politically motivated attempts to harm his campaign and his political movement.
Trump and his two former co-defendants in the key documents case tried to dam the discharge of the report just days before Trump was because of return to office on January 20. Courts rejected their demands to stop publication altogether.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who presided over the documents case, has ordered the Justice Department to halt plans to permit certain high-ranking members of Congress to privately view the documents portion of the report.
It is unclear how much latest information the general public portion of the report will contain.
Prosecutors gave an in depth overview of their case against Trump in earlier court filings. A congressional panel released its own 700-page report in 2022 on Trump's actions after the 2020 election.
Both investigations concluded that after the 2020 election, Trump spread false claims of widespread voter fraud, pressured state legislatures to not certify the vote, and ultimately attempted to benefit from fraudulent voter groups that had promised to vote for Voting for Trump in states that Biden had actually won as a way to stop Congress from certifying Biden's victory.
The effort culminated within the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed Congress in a failed try to stop lawmakers from certifying the vote.
Smith's case was already facing legal hurdles before Trump's election victory. It was paused for months while Trump claimed he couldn’t be prosecuted for official actions as president.
The conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court largely sided with him and granted former presidents broad immunity from prosecution.
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