Donald Trump lashed out at Jack Smith in a borderline incoherent late-night rant after the special counsel released a report finding Trump was part of an “unprecedented criminal effort” to overturn the 2020 election.
Apparently confusing Smith’s criminal case with an earlier investigation by a select committee of the House of Representatives, the president-elect wrote on his social media platform Truth Social: “Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another ‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were.”
And that was just the first sentence.
After Trump refused to concede his 2020 election to President Joe Biden and a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Congress created the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack to investigate Trump’s role in the riot. In December 2022, the committee—which included Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger—voted to refer Trump to the Department of Justice for prosecution.
The House committee’s work was only “a small part of the office’s investigative record” Smith wrote in the first part of his two-volume report, which was released early Tuesday morning. The Department of Justice didn’t release the second volume, which covers allegations that Trump kept and mishandled classified military intelligence after leaving office, because two co-conspirators are still being tried in the case.
For the election interference investigation, Smith’s team interviewed more than 250 people and obtained grand jury testimony from more than 55 witnesses, leading to charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
Smith was forced to suspend his case when Trump won a second term, thanks to a Department of Justice policy that considers it unconstitutional to prosecute a sitting president. But by law, special counsels must submit a report to the attorney general explaining why they brought certain charges.
Despite an 11th-hour attempt from Trump’s lawyers to bury the report, it was made public on Tuesday at 1 a.m. after a federal appeals court paved the way for its release.
“Jack Smith is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide,” Trump’s rant continued. “THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”
Smith’s report details how Trump himself helped run out the clock on the case thanks to his “ability and willingness to use his influence and following on social media to target witnesses, courts and department employees, which required the office to engage in time-consuming litigation to protect witnesses from threats and harassment.”
In a separate post, Trump claimed Smith was “desperate” because he released his “Fake findings at 1:00 A.M. in the morning.”
In fact, the report was released soon after a temporary injunction issued by Judge Aileen Cannon, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2020, expired at midnight. It concluded that if Trump hadn’t won re-election, he would have been convicted for his role in the Jan. 6 riot.