Jack Smith reminds us of the futility of truth in the Trump era
His final report closes the door on a once-hopeful investigation.
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Yesterday unfolded in a sort of perfectly stupid synchronicity, with the past crimes of Donald Trump, as detailed in the just-released Jack Smith report, being overshadowed by the confirmation hearing for Trump’s secretary of defense nominee, Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth’s very Trumpian tendencies toward financial mismanagement and sexual assault took up most of the oxygen, but the Smith report shouldn’t get short shrift. It’s just tough to keep up with Trump’s previous misdeeds when he’s stuffing his new administration full of people ready to help him commit new ones.
Of course, we only get Volume 1 of the special prosecutor’s report, as Judge Aileen Cannon is doing Trump yet another solid by continuing to bar the release of Volume 2. Volume 1, which covers Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, isn’t full of bombshells. That’s in part because Trump’s crimes played out in the public eye for all to see and because much of what Smith recounts here appeared in the grand jury indictments and other court proceedings.
Instead, the report is a sad reminder of the futility of truth in the age of Trump and a subtle, yet still brutal, indictment of the Supreme Court’s unprecedented grant of presidential immunity.
Subtweeting John Roberts and company
Indeed, Smith’s criticism of that Supreme Court decision appears even before the report even begins.
In his letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland accompanying the report, Smith said, quoting John Adams, that the work of the special counsel here “rested upon the fundamental value of our democracy that we exist as ‘a government of laws, and not of men.’” Smith also quoted the Supreme Court itself, from way back in 1882, when it said that “no man in this country is so high that he is above the law.” Of course, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court ultimately decided that one person is indeed so high that he is above the law, a decision that helped usher Trump back into the White House.
That’s why Smith’s report feels a bit quaint, a relic of an era that is now fully behind us. It’s a document that soberly and squarely lays out the crimes Trump was charged with and the facts that supported those charges. It’s a record of following the facts where they led, without fear or favor, and it’s a record of holding the powerful to account. But the combination of the immunity decision and Trump’s promise to turn the Department of Justice into an unholy mix of a personal law firm and a tool for vengeance means we won’t see something this evenhanded again for a long time.
It feels a bit like Smith knows this as well, given the care with which he lays out how the crimes Trump was charged with were well and truly crimes against the United States — against the country itself and the ideals it ostensibly represents.
Trump’s post-election efforts are usually expressed in broad terms like “election interference” or “overturning the election.” But what Smith highlights here feels narrower, yet somehow like an even more foundational attack on democracy. Trump and his co-conspirators were attempting to deprive people of their right to vote because that right, notes Smith, includes both the ability to cast a vote and to have that vote counted.
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Smith quotes Rudy Guiliani, aka Co-Conspirator 1, saying the goal was to “just flat out change the vote, deduct that number of votes from the — declare those votes, 300,000 votes in Philadelphia, illegal, unlawful. Reduce the number by 300,000.” The casualness with which a former United States Attorney suggests depriving hundreds of thousands of Americans of their vote feels harrowing.
So, too, does Smith’s recounting of how the number of allegedly fraudulent votes kept changing. In Arizona, for example, the number of votes Trump and his co-conspirators insisted were cast by non-citizens went from 36,000 to a few hundred thousand to 40,000 to 250,000 to 32,000.
This isn’t just evidence that Trump knew his election fraud claims were a lie. It’s evidence that Trump didn’t care one bit about the right to vote.
The report grounds the discussion of the right to vote in the Reconstruction era. Though Black voters were guaranteed the right to vote following the Civil War, whites engaged in assaults and acts of terror to prevent them from doing so. To address that, Smith explains, Congress passed the Enforcement Act of 1870 and established the DOJ that same year. That act was the predecessor statute of 18 U.S.C. § 241, the modern-day law Trump was charged with violating. That law makes it unlawful to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate someone from exercising a right secured by the Constitution — like voting and having your vote counted.
That invocation of Reconstruction is likely no accident. Conservatives have made a decades-long project of attacking the rights guaranteed in the Reconstruction-era amendments, attacking bodily autonomy, affirmative action, and, of course, the right to vote.
Smith also brings home that Trump’s actions weren’t just a hypothetical attempt to disenfranchise voters or undermine the peaceful transfer of power. There were active calls for his supporters to harass public officials and their families if they didn’t yield to Trump’s demands. There was the targeting of private citizens who happened to be election workers. Large and small, Trump’s actions harmed everyone.
Depressingly relevant as we hurtle into the second Trump administration, Smith’s report also highlights how Trump sucked those around him into his conspiracy, rewarding those who helped further it and threatening to punish those who did not. No one should shed any tears for Mike Pence, but the report is a stark reminder that Trump absolutely did not care if the rioters he incited harmed his vice president. It’s unlikely that anyone in the second Trump administration will display even the merest hint of a spine that Pence did on that day.
An admirable job in impossible circumstances
There’s no doubt that Smith did his job as best he could, despite the unforgivable foot-dragging of Merrick Garland. But ultimately the story of Smith’s report is a story about the abject moral failure of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.
Smith has mountains of evidence showing Trump committed the crimes with which he was charged. He even has a thoughtful section explaining why he didn’t charge Trump with insurrection, a section which boils down to noting there’s an utter lack of case law about what constitutes an insurrection and what providing aid to insurrectionists would look like. But none of that evidence or thoughtfulness ultimately matters, because the immunity decision was a gift for the ages.
Smith, of course, can’t come out and trash the Supreme Court for that decision, but he does what he can to remind the reader how outlandish it was.
“While the lower courts and the dissenting Justices placed greater emphasis on rule of law considerations, the majority found that the need for Presidents to act ‘boldly and fearlessly’ in executing their duties of office was of paramount importance,” he writes.
On the one hand, there’s the entire actual foundation of the American rule of law. On the other hand, some hypothetical future president might need some hypothetical bold fearlessness that requires them to commit crimes. Against that twisted logic, Jack Smith — and the American people — never stood a chance.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
We're in for a very rough ride. A lot will change.
My democracy book club group and I met yesterday and we were discussing that under Trump the word truth has changed to mean lies. I think we need to develop a new word that means what truth used to mean. Right now "Truth Social" means "Lies Social." When Trump or Musk send out their disinformation to the world, as does Putin, and Xi and a whole list of our enemies, including most of the Republican party, they spread lies not truth. So, we should develop a new word that means truth, and just as in popular vernacular the word "Bad" came to mean "Good." "Truth" has come to mean "lies" I think we need a new word for truth and it must rove and change as it too becomes co-opted by those who do not understand how to tell factual information. Or we must develop a sense of which people saying their "truth" really are lying. I have another word for truth because I also speak German. In German the truth is "die Wahrheit."
Would love to know "the truth" in other languages. I know the saying In Vino Veritas. So Veritas is truth. Maybe we can use that too. Veritas. So, Truth Social does not tell the Veritas.