Special counsel Jack Smith speaks about an indictment of former President Donald Trump in August 2023, at a Department of Justice office in Washington. Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

If Donald Trump hadn’t won the presidential election in November, the Justice Department would have had ample evidence to convict him at trial of trying to obstruct the 2020 election results, special counsel Jack Smith said in a report released early Tuesday.

For 137 pages, Smith detailed the incriminating evidence he says he collected against Trump over his two-year investigation, portraying the former and now incoming president as a man who allegedly wielded his power to deceive state lawmakers, Republican Party activists and presidential electors to claim victory in an election he knew he lost.

The Justice Department posted the report on its website shortly before 1 a.m. — less than an hour after a court order barring its release expired. The report serves as the final public record of a historic Justice Department prosecution that never made it to trial, with the federal government abandoning the case in November after its criminal defendant became the president-elect.

Justice Department regulations prohibit the prosecution of a sitting president, but Smith emphasized in his report that dropping the case does not lessen the severity of the crimes that prosecutors allege Trump committed.

“The Department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a President is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Office stands fully behind,” the report reads. “Indeed, 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.”

Much of the evidence against Trump that Smith described Tuesday had been previously detailed before, most recently in a lengthy legal brief the special counsel filed last fall in an attempt to salvage the case. But the report offered new insights into Smith’s investigative process, the challenges his team encountered, and the reasoning behind their decisions on what charges to pursue and which to abandon.

The document was released after a week-long legal battle, with Trump repeatedly trying to prevent the material from reaching the public before he is sworn in for a second term as president next week. It details the breadth of the government’s investigation into Trump, describing voluntary interviews with more than 250 individuals and grand jury testimony from more than 55 witnesses. Prosecutors also obtained search warrants for numerous electronic devices and online records including Trump’s social media account.

A federal court has blocked for now the release of a second volume of Smith’s report that details his separate investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and obstruction of government efforts to retrieve them. Even before that court order, Attorney General Merrick Garland had agreed to keep the volume under wraps while litigation in the case continues.

The election-interference investigation examined how Trump allegedly pressed officials in key swing states to ignore the popular vote and flip electoral votes from Joe Biden to Trump; tried to submit fraudulent slates of electors from such states; threatened Justice Department leaders to open sham investigations and falsely claim election fraud to get states to join the plan; and pressured Vice President Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role overseeing Congress’s election certification on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the results.

Some of those who took literally Trump’s “threats and encouragement of violence against his perceived opponents” eventually joined the mob attack that injured at least 140 police officers and disrupted the certification at the U.S. Capitol, the report said.

In August 2023, the special counsel secured a grand jury indictment of Trump on four federal charges, alleging that he conspired to defraud the country by depriving citizens of having their votes counted and obstructed an official proceeding.

Trump pleaded not guilty.

The report reveals that prosecutors also considered charging Trump with violating the Civil War-era Insurrection Act — one of the nation’s few laws that carries a penalty that prevents people from holding elected office. Smith said prosecutors felt they had enough evidence to prove Trump had provoked the Jan. 6 attack, but opted not to charge him with insurrection because they had no modern precedent to guide them and believed the other charges Trump faced were sufficient.

“The Office did not find any case in which a criminal defendant was charged with insurrection for acting within the government to maintain power, as opposed to overthrowing it or thwarting it from the outside,” the report said.

Once Trump was indicted, his lawyers filed appeal after appeal, delaying a potential trial. The proceedings were paused for months when the Supreme Court took up Trump’s question of whether a president’s immunity from criminal prosecution extends to the actions alleged in the indictment.

In an explosive ruling, the justices largely sided with Trump, dramatically expanding the scope of presidential immunity. That decision prompted the Justice Department to file a whittled down indictment, stripped of evidence and allegations related to the president’s core constitutional powers, such as his oversight of the Justice Department, but bolstered to argue that other official acts were taken as a private candidate seeking office and therefore not immune from prosecution.

The parties were in the process of litigating what allegations could be included in the indictment when Trump won the November election. That meant the case would be dismissed. But under Justice Department regulations, the special counsel still needed to complete a report. And last week, Smith submitted the report to Garland, who sent it to Congress at midnight and released it a short time later.

“While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters,” Smith wrote in a letter to the attorney general that accompanied the report. “I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters.”

During pretrial proceedings, Smith’s team never publicly addressed how Trump’s presidential campaign was impacting the case, only telling judges that politics did not drive their investigation. But Smith acknowledged in the report that he “recognized the weighty issues” inherent in prosecuting a former president who was seeking the White House for the second time.

Smith wrote that his team had an “exceptional working pace” to ensure that they charged Trump by summer 2023 — more than a year before the November election.

“The Office had no interest in affecting the presidential election, and it complied fully with the letter and spirit of the Department’s policy regarding election year sensitivities,” the report says.

In describing the pressure campaign Trump allegedly waged, Smith wrote: “Significantly, he made election claims only to state legislators and executives who shared his political affiliation and were his political supporters, and only in states that he had lost.”

Soon after narrowly losing Arizona, for example, Trump and lawyer Rudy Giuliani sought to convince then-Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers to aid them. According to the report — and Bowers’s previous public statements — the president and Giuliani “used false fraud claims to try to convince the Speaker to call the state legislature into session and replace Arizona’s legitimate electors with Mr. Trump’s illegitimate ones.”

Bowers asked the men to give him evidence of vast fraud or voting by noncitizens, but the evidence never came — and Bowers refused to go along.

In early January 2021, days before Congress was to certify the election results, the report said, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and implored him to “find 11,780 votes” — Biden’s margin of victory in the state. Trump continued to press state and GOP officials, the report said, in Arizona, Michigan and elsewhere.

He “engaged in these efforts even though trusted state and party officials had told him from the outset that there was no evidence of fraud in the election,” the special counsel wrote.

The report also describes how one company — X, then known as Twitter — “resisted a lawful court order issued in the investigation.” Courts ultimately held that the government could bar Twitter from notifying a customer — in this case, Trump — about a search warrant for information related to his account. Twitter was fined $350,000 for failing to show good faith and timely compliance, in a case the Supreme Court declined to review.

Smith has also submitted to Garland the second volume of the report detailing his findings in Trump’s classified documents case, which was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon last summer after she ruled that Smith was unlawfully appointed. The Justice Department is appealing that ruling but has dropped Trump as a party in the appeal because of his election, keeping his two co-defendants and longtime employees, Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.

Nauta and De Oliveira joined Trump in fighting the release of the special counsel report, saying they could be unfairly prejudiced if that classified documents portion is made public and the case against them is later resurrected by an appeals court. Cannon scheduled a hearing Friday to hear their concerns and said she would decide the fate of the classified documents volume after that.

Garland has said he does not intend to publicly release that report while there is ongoing litigation against the co-defendants. But he said he wants to transmit the report to select leaders in Congress if they agree not to make it public.

Smith gave Trump’s attorneys a chance to review his report earlier this month. In a letter to the attorney general that was also released Tuesday by the Justice Department, the lawyers attacked Smith as an “out-of-control private citizen unconstitutionally posing as a prosecutor” and said his report peddled “false and discredited accusations.”

They urged Garland not to make the report public, saying it would interfere with Trump’s transition — an argument they have since unsuccessfully pursued in court.

Smith’s response noted that despite their bluster, Trump’s attorneys had not raised any specific factual objections to the special counsel’s findings. He called their arguments for suppressing its public release “disingenuous.”

In his separate letter to Garland, Smith balked at repeated assertions by Trump and his allies that politics had tainted the special counsel team’s prosecutorial decisions.

“My Office had one north star: to follow the facts and law wherever they led. Nothing more and nothing less,” he wrote. “To all who know me well, the claim from Mr. Trump that my decisions as a prosecutor were influenced or directed by the Biden administration or other political actors is, in a word, laughable.”

Wingett Sanchez reported from Phoenix. Aaron Schaffer in Washington contributed to this report.