In his final report to the Attorney General, Special Counsel Jack Smith stood behind his decision

to criminally charge President-elect Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

In the 137-page report, Smith again detailed the evidence that he and his team amassed and would have presented at trial,

writing, quote, but for Mr. Trump's election and imminent

return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to

obtain and sustain a conviction at trial. The report was written before Smith resigned from the

Department of Justice last week. Our William Brangham has been following all the criminal

investigations into the

president-elect and joins us now. So, William, this is Jack Smith saying he's confident that he

could have convicted Trump, but he was blocked by this long-standing DOJ policy that prohibits

the prosecution of a sitting president. What else did he have to say in the report?

That's right, Omna. We should also say

federal prosecutors always say, as a general rule, that if we could have gone to trial, we would

have been able to convict the defendant. I mean, federal prosecutors, by their nature, do not indict

people. They do not have a great deal of confidence that they could win against. But that said,

this report is really a summary and a sort of encapsulation of all the evidence that his

indictments have shown over the last year. There's nothing really new in here. They're simply

alleging that Donald Trump knew that the 2020 election was lost, that Joe

Biden beat him, that there was no widespread fraud, and that he refused to accept those

results.

And Smith writes, Trump then engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the

legitimate results of the election in order

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