“Because the office reached no final conclusions and did not seek indictments against anyone other than Mr. Trump — the head of the criminal conspiracies and their intended beneficiary — this report does not elaborate further on the investigation and preliminary assessment of uncharged individuals,” it said. “This report should not be read to allege that any particular person other than Mr. Trump committed a crime, nor should it be read to exonerate any particular person.”
The release of this single volume of the report came less than a day after the judge in Florida who oversaw Mr. Trump’s other federal case, the one about the classified documents, issued a ruling allowing it to be made public.
But the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, also barred the Justice Department from immediately releasing — even to Congress — the second volume of Mr. Smith’s report, which is about the documents case. Judge Cannon has scheduled a hearing on Friday in her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., to discuss how to handle that particular volume.
-For more than a week, Mr. Trump’s lawyers — who were shown a draft copy of Mr. Smith’s report before its release — denounced it as little more than an “attempted political hit job which sole purpose is to disrupt the presidential transition.” The lawyers fought the release of the report up to the last minute, but were ultimately unable to stop the volume on the election case from coming out.
In a social media post shortly before 2 a.m. Tuesday, Mr. Trump reacted with anger to the report’s release, calling Mr. Smith “deranged” and insisting that the prosecution was political.