The Reckoning That Wasn’t
Jack Smith’s Testimony Reveals the Full Scope of Trump’s Criminality— And the System That Let Him Walk Free
Of course Jim Jordan chose New Year’s Eve, that liminal moment when champagne corks are popping and resolutions are forming, to release the transcript that should have ended Donald Trump’s political career. The 255 pages landed with all the fanfare of a whispered confession at a deafening party. Which was, of course, precisely the point.
But for those of us who bothered to read the thing—and someone must, if only to serve as witness—Jack Smith's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on December 17th constitutes nothing less than a comprehensive indictment of the 47th President of the United States, delivered under oath, in meticulous prosecutorial detail. The Smith who emerges from these pages is neither the partisan hitman of Republican fantasy nor the avenging angel of liberal imagination. He is something more interesting**,** and to Trump, I am sure, more troubling: a genuine professional, operating by the old rules in an era that has discarded them entirely. It is also, inadvertently, an autopsy of American justice itself: the moment we discover that the corpse has been dead longer than we thought. I mean, sure, we knew yesterday it was pretty much a goner, after we kidnapped Maduro; but, like I alluded to, it died a while ago.
A sidebar: Jim Jordan - What a Guy!
Let’s begin with the most grotesque revelation, because Smith certainly did not bury his lead. During the frantic implementation of Trump’s fake elector scheme—that conspiracy to manufacture alternative slates of presidential electors who would certify a lie—some of the plotters in Pennsylvania developed cold feet. They wanted legal protections. They wanted assurances that they wouldn’t be prosecuted for what they were about to do. The response from Trump’s inner circle, preserved in a text chain obtained by federal investigators, was clarifying in its brutality: “These people should be shot.”
Smith later corrected himself slightly—the text read “Whoever put this slate together should be shot”—but the distinction seems rather academic when you’re discussing summary execution as a response to legal concerns about election fraud. The anxiety, Smith explained, was that this demand for legal cover might “snowball” to other states where similar schemes were underway. Better to eliminate the problem than accommodate it.
This is how they talked to each other. This is what Trump’s conspiracy looked like from the inside: a criminal enterprise so consumed by its own momentum that murder was discussed, however glibly, as a management strategy. One thinks of the Watergate tapes, with their petty scheming and paranoid vindictiveness—but even Nixon’s henchmen never proposed killing their co-conspirators. We have descended into new territory.
The Anatomy of an Insurrection
Smith’s account of January 6th itself reads like a thriller written by someone who despises thrillers—all the more horrifying for its restraint. “President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy,” he told lawmakers. “These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him.”
This is not hyperbole from a partisan actor. This is the considered legal judgment of a career prosecutor who spent years investigating war crimes in The Hague, who brought down corrupt governors and crooked executives, who removed an FBI agent from his own investigation simply because the agent had argued with family members about politics on private email. Smith was so fastidious about the appearance of impartiality that he scrubbed his team of anyone who might provide even a whiff of political motivation. And after all of that, his conclusion was unequivocal: Donald Trump orchestrated an attack on the United States Capitol.
The mechanism was as elegant as it was diabolical. In the weeks leading up to January 6th, Smith explained, Trump “created a level of distrust” and “used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true.” He made false statements to state legislatures, to his supporters, in every conceivable context. “These would be false claims about dead voters. It would be false claims about underage voters. It would be false claims about illegal alien voters.” The claims, Smith noted, “were generally, as a general matter, about urban centers where he had lost the vote in a particular state that was otherwise close by a lot.”
The pattern was unmistakable: any information suggesting Trump could no longer be president, he rejected; any theory, “no matter how far-fetched, no matter how not based in law,” that suggested he could remain in power, he embraced. “When he was told that a fraud claim wasn’t true, he didn’t stop making it.” This was not a man misled by his advisors. This was a man who constructed his own reality and demanded that America live inside it.
And then came the day itself. Trump’s supporters, primed for weeks with lies, descended upon the Capitol. “He was aware in the days leading up to January 6th that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol,” Smith testified. “Now, once they were at the Capitol and once the attack on the Capitol happened, he refused to stop it.”
What he did instead was issue a tweet that, in Smith’s words, “without question in my mind endangered the life of his own Vice President.” Mike Pence, the loyal subordinate who had done Trump’s bidding for four years, was hiding from a mob chanting for his execution because he refused to unilaterally overturn a democratic election. And Trump’s response was to throw gasoline on the fire.
“When the violence was going on,” Smith continued, “he had to be pushed repeatedly by his staff members to do anything to quell it. And then even afterwards he directed co-conspirators to make calls to Members of Congress, people who had been his political allies, to further delay the proceedings.”
The violence was not an accident. Trump caused it, exploited it, and—crucially—refused to stop it. This is the behavior not of a president but of a putschist.
The Bathroom Files
The classified documents case, which Judge Aileen Cannon has done everything in her power to suppress, received less attention in Smith’s testimony—largely because the Justice Department, in a final act of self-sabotage, prevented him from discussing it in detail just an hour before his deposition began. But what Smith was permitted to say was damning enough.
“Our investigation also developed powerful evidence that showed that President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a ballroom and a bathroom.”
Let that image settle for a moment. The former President of the United States took America’s most sensitive secrets—documents concerning national defense, intelligence sources, military operations, the kind of material that gets people killed if it falls into the wrong hands—and stored them next to the toilet paper and beneath the crystal chandeliers of his Florida resort. Mar-a-Lago, that gaudy monument to new money pretensions, became a repository for the nation’s crown jewels. Wedding guests dined yards away from boxes containing information classified at the highest levels. This was not negligence. This was not carelessness. As Smith made clear, Trump “repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”
The obstruction was comprehensive and deliberate. When investigators came calling, Trump lied to them. When subpoenas arrived, he hid evidence. When his own lawyers tried to cooperate, he undermined them. Smith’s team developed “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” of all of it. The case was ready. The conviction was there for the taking.
And then Trump won an election, and all of it simply went away.
Perhaps the most piercing insight in Smith’s testimony came in his description of how Trump operated. The former special counsel compared the ex-president’s scheme to an “affinity fraud”—the term for scams in which con artists exploit pre-existing relationships of trust to fleece their victims. Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, which targeted Jewish charities and social networks, was the textbook example. Trump’s version targeted something larger.
“And in a lot of ways this case was an affinity fraud,” Smith explained. “The President had people who he had built up—who had built up trust in him, including people in his own party, and he preyed on that. Some people wouldn’t do it. Others would. We’re lucky that enough wouldn’t that the election was upheld.”
The word “lucky” lands like a slap. The constitutional order of the United States survived not because of its structural integrity but because a handful of officials—Mike Pence, Brad Raffensperger, the Arizona House Speaker, the Michigan House Speaker, a former congressman from Pennsylvania who was prepared to be a Trump elector—refused to participate in the fraud. Smith praised these Republicans who “put their allegiance to the country before the party.” They “may have changed the course of history,” he said, “in terms of our country of having an election where someone took power in our country who didn’t actually win the election.”
Throughout his testimony, Smith returned again and again to a central theme: the evidence was overwhelming. Asked if he had ever prosecuted someone he didn’t believe was guilty, his answer was simple: “Never.” Asked whether he would prosecute a Democratic president on the same facts, he said he would—“one hundred percent.” Asked whether he ever thought he might not bring charges, he acknowledged there was “absolutely” a time when that was possible, adding that he would have been “comfortable” not charging if the facts and law didn’t support it.
But the facts did support it. The law did support it. “We had proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” Smith said, over and over, like a man trying to inscribe truth into the historical record before it gets erased.
The strength of the January 6th case, Smith emphasized, lay in its reliance on Trump’s own allies. “All witnesses were not going to be political enemies of the President. They were going to be political allies. We had numerous witnesses who would say, ‘I voted for President Trump. I campaigned for President Trump. I wanted him to win.’”
Even Rudy Giuliani, that shambling monument to loyalty unmoored from legality, had participated in a recorded interview in which “he disavowed a number of the claims” about election fraud. The man who held press conferences at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, who dripped hair dye while spinning fantasies about Venezuelan voting machines (let’s not be shocked when our newest POW, Maduro, cops to this being true in some BS exchange for freedom) who helped orchestrate the entire sordid enterprise—even he, when placed under oath and stripped of his carnival-barker persona, admitted the fraud claims were baseless. Giuliani knew they were lies. So did Trump. The evidence showed a president who understood perfectly well that he was spreading falsehoods and did it anyway, because power was more important than truth.
Smith addressed directly the question of Trump’s mental state—whether the former president genuinely believed his own lies. The pattern, he said, was unmistakable: “Any time any information came in that would mean he could no longer be President he would reject it. And any theory, no matter how far-fetched, no matter how not based in law, that would indicate that he could, he latched on to that.” This was not delusion; it was will.
How did a man with this evidence arrayed against him escape accountability? Smith’s testimony provides the answer, though he was too professional to editorialize about it. The obstacles were structural, institutional, and political.
First came the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, which Smith delicately described as having “changed the course of our case.” The ruling that a president cannot be prosecuted for “official acts”—a doctrine invented from whole cloth by the Roberts Court in a decision that read like it had been drafted by Trump’s own lawyers—threw sand in the gears of the prosecution just when it was gaining speed. Chief Justice Roberts and his conservative majority, having already eviscerated voting rights and handed corporations the status of persons, completed their transformation of American jurisprudence by declaring that the president is, in fact, a king. Smith’s team had to rewrite their indictment, excising evidence that the Court had rendered inadmissible. The delay was fatal.
Then came Judge Aileen Cannon, Trump’s hand-picked jurist in Florida, who dismissed the classified documents case on the novel theory that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional—a ruling contradicted by decades of precedent and likely to be overturned on appeal, except that there will be no appeal now. Cannon’s injunction prohibiting Smith from discussing the documents case extended even to his congressional testimony, ensuring that an entire half of his investigation remains shrouded in legally enforced silence.
A Side Bar: Here Comes da Judge.
And finally, of course, there was the election itself. Once Trump won, the Justice Department’s longstanding policy against indicting a sitting president kicked in. Smith resigned. The cases were dismissed. Volume II of his final report—covering the documents investigation—remains sealed, with Attorney General Pam Bondi showing no inclination to release it.
“These prosecutions were not ‘failed,’” Ranking Member Jamie Raskin observed in his statement accompanying the transcript. “They were blocked.” The distinction matters. A failed prosecution suggests inadequate evidence or legal overreach. A blocked prosecution suggests something far more troubling: a system that protects the powerful from the consequences of their crimes.
The final pages of Smith’s testimony are suffused with a kind of grim resignation. Asked whether he expected Trump to seek retribution against him, Smith did not hesitate: “I am eyes wide open that this President will seek retribution against me if he can. I know that.”
Asked whether Trump’s social media posts calling him a “deranged lunatic,” a “psycho,” and a “criminal” constituted direction to the Justice Department to prosecute him, Smith again did not flinch: “Yes.”
But Smith’s concern was not primarily for himself. Throughout the transcript, he returns to the career prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on his cases—public servants who have since been fired, vilified, and subjected to death threats for the crime of doing their jobs.
“I am both saddened and angered that President Trump has sought revenge against career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff simply for doing their jobs and for having worked on those cases,” Smith said. “These dedicated public servants are the best of us, and they have been wrongly vilified and improperly dismissed from their jobs.”
The firing of these officials, Smith warned, means the Department of Justice may lose its institutional capacity to prosecute public corruption. “When you fire people who are career public servants serving both parties over many decades, you lose the expertise about how to do the job properly. And that has an effect on the Department today, and it will have an effect on the Department for some time.”
This is not accidental. This is the point. A Justice Department incapable of prosecuting public corruption is a Justice Department that poses no threat to a corrupt president.
What are we to make of all this? Trump escaped. He is back in the Oval Office, issuing executive orders and pardoning January 6th rioters and systematically dismantling the institutions that tried to hold him accountable. In the narrow legal sense, he won.
But Smith’s testimony exists. It is now part of the public record, no matter how inconveniently Jim Jordan tried to bury it. Future historians—assuming we’ll still have those - I do wonder just how much this country can take - will read these 255 pages and understand what happened. They will know that a president of the United States fomented an insurrection. They will know that his allies discussed shooting people who asked legal questions. They will know that classified secrets were stored in bathrooms and ballrooms. They will know that the evidence was sufficient to convict, and that conviction never came because power protects its own.
“There is no historical analog for what President Trump did in this case,” Smith told lawmakers. “As we said in the indictment, he was free to say that he thought he won the election. He was even free to say falsely that he won the election. But what he was not free to do was violate federal law and use knowing—knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function.”
He did it anyway. And here we are.
The American experiment has always rested on a certain faith—that our institutions are stronger than any individual, that the rule of law applies to everyone, that power cannot simply decree its own immunity. Jack Smith’s testimony is a 255-page testament to the death of that faith. Not because he failed, but because he succeeded. He built the case. He gathered the evidence. He was ready to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that a former president was a criminal.
And none of it mattered.
The transcript was released at 11:59 on New Year’s Eve, just in time for America to pretend it never happened. But it did. We were watching. We need to remember. And perhaps that is the only justice left: the justice of the historical record, inscribed in the congressional testimony of a prosecutor who did everything right and still lost.
“If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today,” Smith said, “I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”
He would. But he can't. And that, in the end, is the American story in 2026: a nation that knows exactly what happened, and has decided—collectively, institutionally, with full knowledge of the consequences—to let it go.
It is lawlessness that is upon us now. No longer are we talking hypotheticals.
Yesterday, Trump invaded another country under the pretense of a narco drug threat against Americans from a country that is not a problem in the drug trade. He went without authorization of Congress, pushing the limits of what he did with Israel and Iran. This time it was bigger, more dangerous, and without any pretext now—certainly not after Pete Hegseth went on CBS and said the quiet part aloud: that through "strategic action" we can ensure "access to additional wealth and resources."
Lawlessness.
You can read the entire deposition here.
