US President-elect Donald Trump engaged in criminal effort to retain power after 2020 polls, says Special Counsel Jack Smith’s probe report

US Special Counsel Jack Smith said that President-elect Donald Trump engaged in an “unprecedented criminal effort” to retain power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden. In an over 130-page report published on Tuesday, Smith details how Trump tried to overturn the election results and also accused him of plotting to obstruct the collection and certification of votes.

“As set forth in the original and superseding indictments, when it became clear that 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,” CNN quoted the report as saying.

The report, that came less than a week before the President-elect’s inauguration on January 20, also said the “throughline of all of Trump’s criminal efforts was deceit, knowingly false claims of election fraud, and the evidence shows that he used these lies as a weapon to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process”.

Smith’s report concludes that the evidence would have been enough to convict Trump at trial, but his return to the White House made that impossible.

In August 2023, Trump was charged with working to overturn the election, but the case was delayed by appeals and ultimately significantly narrowed by the Supreme Court, which held for the first time that former Presidents enjoy sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts.

The President-elect had pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Although much of the evidence cited in Smith’s report was already made public before, it also includes some new details like prosecutors considering charging Trump with inciting the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol under a US law known as the Insurrection Act.

But prosecutors ultimately concluded that such a charge posed legal risks and there was insufficient evidence that Trump intended for the “full scope” of violence during the riot, a failed attempt by a mob of his supporters to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election.

The indictment charged Trump with conspiring to obstruct the election certification, defraud the US of accurate election results and deprive American voters of their voting rights.

Smith’s office determined that charges may have been justified against some co-conspirators accused of helping Trump carry out the plan, but the report said prosecutors reached no final conclusions.