The US Department of Justice had enough evidence to convict Trump of interfering in the 2020 election if he had not won the presidential election last November.
This is stated in the report of special counsel Jackie Smith, who led the case on Trumpʼs interference in the 2020 election, WP reports.
Justice Department rules prohibit prosecuting a sitting president for crimes, but Smith stressed that the fact that the cases were dropped does not make the crimes that prosecutors claim Trump committed any less serious.
The report details a pressure campaign that Trump allegedly conducted in “tickle states”. He contacted state leaders and urged them to “take action to ignore the vote count”.
“He made electoral claims only to those state legislators and leaders who shared his political affiliation and were his political supporters, and only in those states he lost,” the report said.
For example, when it became clear that Trump had lost in Arizona, he and his lawyer tried to convince then-Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives Rusty Bowers to help. The report says they “used false claims of fraud to try to convince the speaker to call the state legislature into session and replace Arizona’s legitimate voters with Mr. Trump’s illegitimate ones”.
Bowers asked for evidence of widespread fraud or non-citizen voting, but no evidence was provided.
In early January 2021, days before Congress certified the election results, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and begged him to “find 11 780 votes” — the margin that gave Biden victory. Trump continued to pressure state and Republican officials, the report said, in Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere.
At the same time, the second report, which concerns the case where Trump allegedly kept secret documents, has not yet been made public — the president-electʼs lawyers appealed to the court with such a request, and it was granted.
In the classified documents case, the US District Judge Eileen Cannon dismissed all charges last July after ruling that Smith was improperly appointed as special counsel. Trumpʼs lawyers also point to this, saying Smithʼs report spread "false and discredited allegations".
Smith noted that Trumpʼs lawyers have not raised any specific factual objections to his report.
The Justice Department appealed the courtʼs July ruling, but removed Trump from the case due to his political status, leaving only two co-defendants — Waltin Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.
Nauta and De Oliveira do not want the report to be made public, saying that if the appeals court reopens the case, it could create a prejudiced opinion about them. There will be a hearing on Friday, where a judge will consider their arguments and then decide whether to release the report.
Cases against Trump
Three cases have been filed against the former US president — for conspiracy to overturn the election results and Trumpʼs role in storming the Capitol, for his possession of classified documents, and for his alleged attempt to change the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on September 18 last year. However, his lawyers have asked for the date to be postponed, arguing that a September sentencing could affect his re-election campaign. They say punishing the former president at the height of his campaign to return to the White House would amount to election interference.
New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Mercan agreed and explained that the court is impartial and apolitical.
Donald Trump won the presidential election on November 5, so the court did not issue verdicts in these cases.
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