‘Frankly sick’: Conservatives fume over release of Jack Smith report on Trump’s 2020 election plot
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Republicans rubbish special counsel’s findings on president-elect’s attempt to overthrow democracy as ‘not a big deal’, labelling it instead ‘a one-sided, prosecutor’s version of reality’. Conservative media has reacted with scorn to the decision by US Attorney General Merrick Garland to release Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election.
![[Former House speaker Newt Gingrich interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business on Tuesday January 14 2025]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/14/16/Screenshot-2025-01-14-4.07.18-PM.jpg)
Smith, who announced his resignation on Friday, was forced to wrap up his investigation into the president-elect after Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s race for the White House. But he left behind a detailed 174-page report into his findings that concluded Trump would have been convicted, given the weight of the evidence against him, had he not been saved from jail by the American electorate.
“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 wrote, going on to outline the former president’s pressure campaign against his own deputy Mike Pence, the fraudulent electors plot and many other aspects of his battle to upend the result and cling to power.
None of which seemed to cut it on Fox News’s breakfast show Fox and Friends on Tuesday morning, where Smith’s condemnation of the once and future president for attempting to subvert democracy was breezily dismissed out of hand as “not a big deal” by anchor Brian Kilmeade.
