What You Need To Know About Jack Smith’s Report
Sources:
Final Report of the Special Counsel, https://www.justice.gov/storage/Report-of-Special-Counsel-Smith-Volume-1-January-2025.pdf
Does Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 Report Matter? What Next? Podcast from Slate, Jan. 15, 2025, https://slate.com/podcasts/what-next/2025/01/jack-smith-releases-his-january-6-report
Perry Stein & Jeremy Roebuck, What we learned from the Trump Jan. 6 report by special counsel Jack Smith, Washington Post, Jan. 14, 2025, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/01/14/takeaways-jack-smith-trump-jan-6-report/
Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Jack Smith’s final say: Takeaways from the special counsel’s report, Politico, Jan. 14, 2025, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/14/jack-smith-special-counsel-report-takeaways-00198252
Harry Litman, No, Merrick Garland Did Not Let Donald Trump Skate, The New Republic, Jan. 15, 2025, https://newrepublic.com/article/190248/merrick-garland-trump-prosecution-delays
Marita Vlachou, Democrats Call On Merrick Garland To Preserve Records On Trump Prosecutions, HuffPost, Jan. 14, 2025, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/senate-dems-garland-letter-trump-cases_n_67864c64e4b02348137a6804
Transcript:
Channel favorite Daddy Jack Smith has been a topic of conversation here at Why, America? With Leeja Miller for the better part of the last nearly 3 years. And while I’m sad to see him go, I love to watch him leave, if you know what I mean. Just kidding… But to send off our sweet prince into the sunset of what I hope is a lengthy and well-earned retirement, I wanted to do his report justice by actually reading it and telling you what’s in it. What does it all mean? Well, nothing, mostly, because we’ve fully lost the plot in this country and people who attempt coups and contradict themselves and drink too much and assault people and do not have any credentials that would make them qualified or even suitable for their jobs have zero responsibility to answer for their actions. But despite this reality it’s important to at least attempt to maintain a grasp on how things are supposed to be, and giving this damning report the attention it deserves is part of that, because it outlines in great detail the exact extent to which the man who will be president starting next week worked to enact a coup to take over the government after a democratically held free and fair election. Had this happened anywhere else we would look at him as a populist strongman interested in wielding his militarized christian nationalist gang of supporters as a means of seizing power in a failing democracy. But since it’s America, we just call him President and pretend everything’s fine! This report says otherwise, and it’s important to remember that everything is not fine, and this is not normal. We’ll break down what’s in the report, why it matters, and what’s this means going forward. Let’s get into it.
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Ongoing coverage of the investigation into January 6th has been extremely partisan and biased, and the latest news about the release of Jack Smith’s report is no different.
This recent report from AlterNet caught my attention with the headline “Political hacks and thugs: Trump fumes as Jack Smith report details ‘criminal efforts.’
This caught my eye because it’s not just reporting the news but also Trump’s reaction to it, though I’ve often found that when news reports say Trump is “fuming” it’s because of a tweet or two.
Using the Ground News browser extension, it’s helpful to see that this news source has a left leaning bias. I really love the Ground News web browser extension because I can see it while I browse news articles and if I want to see how other sources are framing the story I can click full coverage.
On the Ground News website you can see that there are 419 sources covering this topic
Among them, the left publication WhoWhatWhy uses the headline: “In Damning Report on Trump’s Coup, Smith Puts His Neck on the Line for Justice - WhoWhatWhy” while the right-leaning New York Sun frames it as: “Jack Smith, in a Defiant Final Report, Insists That He Could Have Convicted Trump for January 6”. Very different takes, and it's a clear example of how consuming news from only one perspective can limit your understanding of a situation.
This is where Ground News comes in - and why I've been using them for over a year. Today’s partner Ground News is an app and website that offers tools to help you critically analyze the news you read, providing context to understand the full picture.
If you scroll down you can see the overall factuality rating of the sources–86% of these sources score high factuality ratings, so you can tell which sources you can trust. You can also see more information about who owns which source, only 10% of stories come from independent news sources and 57% from media conglomerates. Knowing this information can help uncover any potential conflicts of interest in the stories and who’s covering them.
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The full report is in the sources of this video, linked in the description, you can read it for yourself, and I highly recommend that you do. Even just reading the first 3 pages of his cover letter to Merrick Garland was a breath of fresh air because it’s just nice to read words from a lawyer that sound rational and like they actually give a shit about the rule of law. Feels, frankly, from a bygone era. Though it’s not, there are so many great lawyers in this country doing work at a high level of ethics, so don’t despair. Daddy Jack’s letter is an example of this. In that cover letter, he makes it pretty clear, saying “my Office gathered relevant evidence and examined whether that evidence established violations of federal criminal law. In doing so I was guided by the Principles of Federal Prosecution, a series of considerations designed to promote the fair and evenhanded application of the law. As set forth in my Report, after conducting thorough investigations, I found that, with respect to both Mr. Trump's unprecedented efforts to unlawfully retain power after losing the 2020 election and his unlawful retention of classified documents after leaving office, the Principles compelled prosecution. Indeed, Mr. Trump's cases represented ones "in which the offense [was] the most flagrant, the public harm the greatest, and the proof the most certain."”
His letter also makes an effort to dispel any potential rumors or ability for anyone on the right to discount it by explicitly saying no one within the DOJ attempted to interfere with the prosecution or investigation. This is important because that is the literal point of a special prosecutor. In the wake of Watergate, when it was clear that Nixon wielded way too much control over the DOJ and others that were supposed to be independent from him, special prosecutors became a way to ensure that investigations into the president were separate from the Attorney General that is appointed by the president. That is the point and Jack Smith clearly took that standard very seriously. But because Republicans and the right, once again, do not have any integrity, they suspect everyone around them of having no integrity and have long accused Jack Smith and Robert Muller before him of being partisan hacks, despite decades of professional experience to the contrary. As I like to scream from the rooftops, no one is truly unbiased. That being said, there are still people who make an attempt to remove their bias from their work as much as possible by following professional guidelines, decorum, and standard procedures, which Jack Smith has at least attempted to make clear is what he did here. I think that’s important to note and a lost artform in THESE TRYING TIMES!!!
One thing to note is that the report that was released was just Volume 1, relating to the January 6th case. There is a second volume regarding the mar a lago documents case that Jack Smith was also prosecuting which he recommended not be released publicly as there are two ongoing lawsuits against coconspirators, so to avoid prejudice the second volume should only be released after their cases end, and those cases will likely end during Trump’s tenure so lord knows we’re never going to see the second volume of this report.
Okay, let’s get into the report. I won’t bore you with too many details because frankly a lot of this was already public knowledge. It’s important to note that nothing about this report is indecisive. Unlike Robert Muller’s report about his investigation into Trump’s collusion with Russia, which was largely inconclusive, Smith and his team were very sure that they had enough evidence and information to convict Trump on the charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction, and conspiracy against the rights of US citizens. Page 2 of the report says, clearly, “substantial evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump then engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power. … This included attempts to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force Justice Department officials and his own Vice President, Michael R. Pence, to act in contravention of their oaths and to instead advance Mr. Trump's personal interests; and, on January 6, 2021, to direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters' violence to further delay it.”
A major issue in this case and that Smith would have had to prove at trial was whether Trump actually believed the bullshit he was slinging. Based on their extensive investigation, he did not. “The Office investigated whether Mr. Trump believed the claims he made. Evidence from a variety of sources established that Mr. Trump knew that there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, that many of the specific claims he made were untrue, and that he had lost the election. He knew this because some of the highest-ranking officials in his own Administration, including the Vice President, told him directly that there was no evidence to support his claims.” It goes on to list all of the times people who were close to him, who were advisors to him, who he relied on for this information, who knew what they were talking about, told him time and again that his fraud claims were wrong, there was no evidence to prove they were correct, and his multiple court cases trying to prove fraud were rejected, every last one of them.
The ONLY reason, according to the report, that Trump was not convicted for his crimes related to the January 6th insurrection is because the rules are very clear that the Justice Department cannot actively prosecute a case against a sitting president.
Here’s the thing though, while the vast majority of the information laid out in this report is not new and much of it was disclosed during the discovery process leading up to what was supposed to be Trump’s January 6th trial and by the Congressional January 6th committee, having a report like this provides, for the record and for posterity, a meticulously laid out recitation of the facts as discovered during the investigation.
One of Trump’s prime tactics to sow disinformation and distrust is to deny and rewrite very recent history largely as it’s unfolding and largely through Fox News interviews and individual tweets, all of which get lost in the shuffle of all of us consuming all the content we consume every single day and all of the random think pieces and news reports about various of his activities. Fact checking and debunking is important as these things unfold, but it can become so loud and so saturated with information that it’s hard to keep track of it all. This is 174 pages that say he lied. He lied. He lied. He lied. And he knew he lied, every single time.
Not only that, but the report lays out clearly, over and over again, that the riot on January 6th would not have happened but for Trump. This was a huge obstacle as well for Smith, because Trump, ever the mob boss, has always claimed plausible deniability over the riots. I made a speech, I didn’t tell them to do anything, if anyone got hurt that’s not on me. Over and over, this report lays out, January 6th rioters who were convicted told courts of law on the record that it was Trump who inspired them.
So we now have, on the public record, for all to see, forever, this very clear outline of what happened, what Trump did, what he knew, and how he broke the law, at least according to this investigation. Thinking big picture about things like this for posterity is very important. This is going to be a heavily studied period in American history, assuming anything is left on this rotting corpse of a planet long enough for this to be history. Given how much we rely on contemporaneous evidence to give historical context, this report is important. And I wanted to give attention to this report and share it with you all because I do think it is important, and I think it’s a disservice to Daddy Jack Smith, the work he did, and the weight of Trump’s alleged crimes to write it off as unimportant.
That being said, the maddening part about this whole report IS the manner in which it was released. Quietly. In the middle of the night. The report was released around 1 in the morning. Which is annoying but frankly not uncommon, one of the things that surprised me most especially working with government attorneys is how down to the wire they get with their filings. EVERYTHING is an 11th hour filing. Sometimes that’s strategic, if you file something a day or two early that gives the other party time to review your filing before filing their own simultaneous brief. But a lot of it is because attorneys generally in my experience are poor project managers so they are mainly motivated by deadlines only. So honestly Merrick Garland’s middle of the night release of the report isn’t unusual, given that Merrick Garland is the head of all government attorneys. But also he released it as soon as he could, because there was a court-ordered hold on its release that expired at midnight right before he released it. Trump had fought tooth and nail against the release of the report and two separate courts ended up rejecting his arguments before it was finally released.
The timing sucks also because it came out during a busy news cycle as Trump is about to take office and his appointees are being confirmed. The media had its sights set on the Pete Hegseth hearing yesterday, which largely went exactly as anticipated–Republicans licked his boots and Democrats yelled but! But! But! You said bad things about women!!!!! And he will be confirmed anyway, despite credible allegations of abuse, despite zero qualifications, despite alleged drinking problems that will absolutely impede his ability to effectively do his job, despite being literally the most underqualified person in the history of the department of defense to be appointed to that position. None of it fucking matters. Republicans don’t care, and Trump’s base of supporters sure as shit don’t care. Perhaps if lawmakers had spent less time focusing on pointing out his hypocrisy or how much he hates women and LGBTQ folks, things that clearly a full 50% of the electorate don’t care enough about to disqualify a person from office, they could have asked him tough questions related to day to day things he would have to do on the job to see how he would handle them. That’s what would happen in any run of the mill job interview for a high ranking job. Do you actually have the experience and knowledge to do the job? The answer would very clearly be no, but we didn’t really get at that yesterday because Democrats were so hung up on how he’s a misogynist. No shit. That’s not something your constituents apparently care about. That being said, even being shown that he’s woefully unqualified for the job because he does not know how to do the job probably also wouldn’t have swayed any of the Republicans who will vote to appoint him as secretary of defense, because party loyalty comes above everything else in this country. Trump said it’s him, so it’s him. Which is why I’m not making a whole episode today about the Pete Hegseth confirmation hearings or probably any of the confirmation hearings because they are so predictable as to not be newsworthy, and the noise being made about them is drowning out other news. Like that Jack Smith would have been able to successfully prosecute Donald Trump for a violent insurrection, had he been given the opportunity. And that fucking stings. We could have got him. And because of nothing more than his ability to afford a robust team of crooked lawyers that delayed long enough for him to win the election, Trump gets to ride away into the sunset, posting smugly on Truth social that Jack Smith is a “lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the election.”
And one argument people on the left have been ringing alarm bells about, is that Jack Smith was not given adequate time or opportunity to fully investigate these cases and bring them to trial. He was not appointed as special counsel until November of 2022, after Trump declared he would be seeking reelection in 2024 and over a year and a half after the events of January 6th. This, despite the fact, that we ALL know Trump is very very good at hiring enough lawyers to throw wrenches into any and all legal challenges he faces, to drag their feet, to delay, deny, defend. Going into this, EVERYONE knew it would be an uphill battle to bring Trump to justice. And a lot of the blame is being placed on the Biden administration and, specifically, Merrick Garland, for the delay. However, reporting from The New Republic as well as the special counsel report itself indicate that Garland gathered prosecutors together in March 2021 to begin investigations into Trump, and he was actively seeking to hold him accountable for any crime he may have committed, taking actions and gathering evidence prior to the appointment of Daddy Jack Smith.
In the special counsel’s report, Jack Smith lays all of the blame for the delays on difficulties he faced not just with Trump and his delay tactics but also numerous other people from whom his team sought information. Specifically, Elon Musk. After Musk bought twitter, the special counsel tried to get Trump’s account data from the company, which was delayed for weeks despite a court order requiring the company to disclose the information, because of course. Musk has been a Trump lapdog for much longer than he’s been head of an imaginary governmental department. Twitter was eventually hit with a $350,000 fine for refusing to comply. Politicians like Scott Perry delayed in handing over text messages for over a year. And then there was, of course, the unexpected and unprecedented and unfounded decision by the Supreme Court of the United States to name Trump a tiny lil king whose official actions were immune from prosecution. This required the filing of a superseding indictment to change the language enough to claim that he is guilty because of his unofficial acts entirely. Something that, again, Jack Smith declared he is sure he could have still prosecuted him on, but was required in order for the case to move forward. But Trump milked claims of “immunity” for all they were worth, not just stemming from that Supreme Court case but also, according to the report, in order to block testimony from key witnesses, claiming his communications with them were privileged, claims that were rejected time and again by judges as a clear attempt to delay the proceedings. And they did delay the proceedings significantly, with each objection and claim of immunity needing to be followed by briefing and judicial review.
So while I think Merrick Garland could have been less skittish and more quick to name a special counsel to investigate the January 6th attack, there are multiple factors at play here, and frankly an extra 18 months would not have cut it. The Supreme Court’s decision to give Trump sweeping immunity alone put the case on pause for a full 8 months while the parties exchanged filings to determine whether the case could move forward. There was no trial date set, and lord knows Trump and his team would have fought as many individual pieces of evidence as possible. Then, any potential conviction could have been appealed, a process Trump’s team is pursuing regarding his hush money case in New York and one they certainly would have pursued had he been found guilty in the special counsel’s cases, which would have absolutely overlapped with Trump’s eventual second rise to the presidency. The unfortunate reality of litigation is that it takes a LONG time, and it is a defense attorney’s JOB to throw as many wrenches into the mix as possible to protect their client. Some may argue that Trump’s lawyers’ tactics stretched and potentially crossed the limits of ethical conduct, but no one could argue they aren’t zealously representing their client. These checks and balances are in place so that one president can’t openly prosecute an incoming president, its just that the countervailing check did not pan out–the one where we’re supposed to trust that the American people wouldn’t be willing to elect a convicted or even accused felon. Alas, that is not the case, so the check given to us as the people was foiled and it is only the check that holds that you can’t continue to prosecute a sitting president, that was maintained. A check I’m certain Trump himself would attempt to subvert were the roles reversed.
However, this is not the end of the road for the special counsel’s report and investigation. While the report provides a helpful in depth review of the evidence found and the process followed by the special counsel’s office, there is still a treasure trove of primary documents, text messages, internal memos, recordings, grand jury testimony, that can often prove more salacious than a report written by the special counsel, especially once the media can get their grubby paws on it and find the most damning exchanges. Seeing it written out in a text or hearing a recording is very different from having it described to you in a 174 page document. That trove, according to reporting from Politico, could be more consequential than the report itself, giving the example that the January 6th committee’s report did not draw as much attention or outrage as the release of the actual primary documents they uncovered in their investigation. There are legal efforts underway to bring those primary documents and grand jury testimony to light. The question is whether the public interest in releasing the documents outweighs the value of the confidentiality of the contents. Especially given that the prosecution is no longer ongoing, there are arguments in favor of making the documents public as they are no longer subject to an open investigation or pending case. Time will tell whether we’ll get to SEE all the juiciest tidbits for ourselves.
According to reporting from Huff Post, 10 democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have sent a letter to Merrick Garland requesting that he retain all records of the DOJ’s prosecutions against Trump for this very reason, citing concerns that Trump plans to weaponize the DOJ. Preservation of government records is, of course, the status quo, but lord knows nothing in the status quo can be assumed or taken for granted once Trump is in office, so the letter just brings light to the fact that there will be a whole host of new characters with direct access to all these records starting NEXT WEEK, and there’s a very real possibility of misconduct and mishandling, given Trump’s proclivity to store important files in the bathroom.
Okay. Let’s take a pause. Take a deep breath. The inauguration is on Monday. This is really happening even though it feels like a very bad fever dream. While I’ll continue to scream about the atrocities, a lot of the time there’s not much you or I can do about things like who’s going to handle the January 6th investigation documents and whether they’ll ever be released, for example. So when I feel powerless, I try to turn towards the things I do have control over. Here are some things to reconnect with if you are feeling similarly powerless:
Who is in your immediate community of friends and family and have you reached out to them or spent time with them recently?
Have you had enough water today? Vegetables? Have you moved your body? Have you taken enough rest?
What is one thing you can tangibly do today to improve your community or help a neighbor?
I also think that, despite our powerlessness, it’s important to remain engaged and informed about what’s happening. And preferably not via scrolling through social media which can cause us to disconnect and feel numb. While there is always a political circus happening at the capitol, the bread and butter of what our representatives in Congress are supposed to be doing is passing laws. So tracking the laws they’re suggesting, the bills they introduce, is a great way to tangibly pay attention to what they’re doing, which makes it easier to be in conversation with your own lawmakers because you know what they’re working on day to day. Fast Democracy dot com is one of the more user friendly bill tracking sites of found, this is not sponsored if you like another one please drop it in the comments so we can all find these resources. You can sign up for a free account and track bills in Congress and in your state.
I’M personally feeling very anxious about what’s to come, so I’m hosting a seance on Sunday night, an inauguration eve seance. To summon the spirit of revolution. It’s basically going to be a livestream pep talk in which I share some insight into inspiring people and past movements to give us fortitude for the coming years. And also for commiseration. If you’re interested, sign up at the link below and I’ll send you the watch link to join me on Sunday.
And you can join me over on my Patreon where I just launched the Why, America? Co-Learning Lab, a learning community having discussions and making connections, along with a monthly syllabus curated by me. All year we’ll be covering topics under the umbrella theme of “Eat the Rich: Building Solidarity in the New Gilded Age.” This month’s topic is all about learning from history to fight for the future. We’re looking at and discussing past movements to see where we can learn from history, because it does have a tendency to repeat itself. This is all hosted over on Patreon, which is linked down below. If you’re interested, please join us.
Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Art, David, R_H, L’Etranger (Lukus), Joshua Cole, Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!
And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the from a while ago where I discuss how fucked we are for future environmental disasters with Trump as president.
