Every key finding from the Trump special counsel report that impacts the president-elect
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US Attorney General Merrick Garland releases Jack Smith’s final conclusions on effort to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win after investigation curtailed. US Attorney General Merrick Garland has released Jack Smith’s final report into his investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The outgoing Justice Department Special Counsel findings do not make for flattering reading for the president-elect.
![[Trump attempted to weaponize Mike Pence’s role in certifying the election results]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/11/13/17/newFile-10.jpg)
Smith curtailed his probe into the 45th president’s alleged election interference plot in November after Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 vote to secure a return to the White House. Justice Department protocol forbids it from investigating a sitting president, ending Smith’s hope of securing a conviction against Trump and ultimately prompting his resignation last Friday.
![[Trump appears remotely for a sentencing hearing in front of New York State Judge Juan Merchan in the criminal case in which he was convicted in 2024]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/10/14/SEI235553847.jpg)
“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”, Smith writes in the 174-page filing. Those efforts included, he argues, “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”.
Having laid out the evidence against the president-elect in exhaustive detail, much of which has been previously established, the special counsel states flatly that only Trump’s victory over Harris in November’s presidential vote could have saved him from being convicted for attempting to subvert the 2020 election.
