MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Early this morning, special counsel Jack Smith closed the book on his election interference charges against Donald Trump. Smith says that criminal case would have produced a conviction against Trump but for Trump's return to the White House this year. Smith also defended his work against accusations that he acted with politics in mind. He said he and his team followed one North Star - the facts, wherever they led. NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson has been poring over the 174 pages of the report. Hi, Carrie.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: That's an awfully confident assessment, that he says this would have produced a conviction against Trump. What was the evidence that gave him so much confidence that he could get a conviction on four felony counts?
JOHNSON: Jack Smith outlined a pervasive pattern of deceit about the 2020 election. He talked about doing interviews with aides and Trump family members that suggest Donald Trump said one thing in public about election fraud and another in private. And Smith mentioned a November 2020 comment Trump allegedly made after watching Joe Biden on TV, basically saying, can you believe I lost to this guy?
Smith also said it was foreseeable that violence would happen at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and that Trump took advantage of it. He refused to call off the mob for hours and actually said, so what, when Trump learned Mike Pence was in danger there. And the prosecutors say they would have convicted if a trial was allowed to happen. But ultimately, that won't happen because of a long-standing Justice Department policy that sitting presidents cannot be charged or tried for crimes.
KELLY: And the backdrop is that Jack Smith has resigned. He's dropped his cases. So the basic question - but why does this report matter at this point?
JOHNSON: This was really a chance for prosecutors to explain what they did and why. In large part, they're writing for history at a time when Donald Trump and many Republican lawmakers have been calling the rioters hostages and patriots. Smith also got a chance to respond to criticism about possible delay in the Justice Department case. He said some of that is because Trump fought so hard over executive privilege, which took months and months, and that the Supreme Court took a long time to both accept this case over whether Trump had immunity and then to decide it. And the prosecutors also said they had a harder job than the House January 6 Committee did because they had a higher bar to meet.
Finally, we learned from this report that prosecutors considered charging Trump with insurrection, which could have disqualified him from running for office, but hardly anyone has been charged with that crime for decades. And they also considered charging him with incitement for comments that he made at the rally before the mob descended on the Capitol, but that's a really high legal bar, and they didn't meet it.
KELLY: Well, I will note Trump fought until the last hour. He was fighting still last night to block the report's release. Now that it is out, we can read it. Is this the end of all of the trials that President-elect Trump was facing?
JOHNSON: The criminal trials, I think, largely, yes, but the former president and President-elect still faces civil claims from some of the 140 law enforcement officers who were brutalized at the Capitol with things like flagpoles and bear spray. And prosecutions may actually continue at the state level for some of Trump's alleged coconspirators.
KELLY: Oh, stay with them for a second, the alleged coconspirators. These are people like Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman. You were talking about state charges. What about federal cases against them?
JOHNSON: Neither of those attorneys has been charged with a federal crime. Jack Smith says his team had made some preliminary decisions about charging other people and whether to try them alongside Donald Trump or separately. That work's over now, though, and it's hard to imagine the Trump Justice Department would take up any of those cases. In fact, it's far more likely Trump will pardon many of those at the Capitol as soon as next week when he's inaugurated.
KELLY: And Carrie, last thing. Jack Smith had two cases against Trump. The other one was the classified documents case at Mar-a-Lago. What happens to that case now?
JOHNSON: You know, the Justice Department is trying to keep alive the case against Trump's codefendants there. Those are longtime Mar-a-Lago aides Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira. It's still an open question whether we're going to see Volume 2 of Jack Smith's report, and that focuses on the highly classified materials the FBI found in Trump's home and in ballrooms and bathrooms in Florida. Florida Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed to the bench by Donald Trump, has called for a hearing on releasing that part of the Smith report in Florida this Friday.
KELLY: This Friday. NPR's Carrie Johnson, thank you.
JOHNSON: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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