Our next book is tentatively titled The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the January 6, 2021 insurrection.
Alan Feuer and Charlie Savage at NYT:
The Justice Department released a 137-page volume early Tuesday morning laying out the details of the investigation that the former special counsel Jack Smith conducted into President-elect Donald J. Trump’s attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election.
The release of the report, which Mr. Trump’s legal team had vehemently fought, is likely to be the Justice Department’s final word on the attempt to use the legal system to hold Mr. Trump accountable for conspiring to subvert the election results. Because Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, prosecutors were forced under a binding Justice Department policy to drop the case against him.
...
In what amounted to his report’s most important finding, Mr. Smith asserted he was confident that his team of prosecutors and investigators had amassed enough evidence to convict Mr. Trump had the case been allowed to go to trial.
The report spent nearly 30 pages recounting the details of how Mr. Trump engaged in multiple criminal conspiracies. Much of that was already in public view through the indictment in the case and a lengthy evidentiary memo that Mr. Smith filed in October as part of the fallout from the Supreme Court’s ruling that Mr. Trump enjoyed presumptive immunity for his official acts as president.
Mr. Smith said his office “stands fully behind” both “the strength of the government’s proof” and “the merits of the prosecution.” And despite the major setbacks he faced in his more than two years of pursuing the case, he stuck by the core accusations leveled against Mr. Trump.
“The through line of all of Mr. Trump’s criminal efforts was deceit — knowingly false claims of election fraud — and the evidence shows that Mr. Trump used these lies as a weapon to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process,” Mr. Smith wrote.
