House MAGAts released Jack Smith's secret testimony. No surprise, he kicked their asses.

Trump's toadies dumped the news on New Years Eve. I read what they tried to bury.

Leave it to the MAGA Republicans to ring out the old year with one last blast of craven stupidity. Mike Johnson’s House crew apparently assumed that releasing Jack Smith’s recent secret testimony in the midst of holiday festivities would somehow ensure that nobody would notice, that everyone would be too drunk or stoned to read the transcript and rightly conclude that the ex-special counsel had eviscerated his hapless inquisitors - and leaving no doubt that he had abundant ammo to paint Trump as a criminal in a federal court of law.

Granted, most Americans probably don’t care about the transcript. Trump has moved on, launching a war in Venezuela, and besides, Smith’s criminal case is officially dead - killed off by the 77 million voters who re-hired Trump despite his rape of democracy in the wake of his 2020 defeat. So consider me an outlier who pays attention. On New Years Day, rather than succumb to the Mummers Parade that was bleating noise two blocks away, I burrowed into the transcript Q &A, all 255 pages. I know that sounds like a slog, but frankly it was boffo entertainment. Chalk that up to my perverse sense of humor. The way Smith slapped those dumb dudes silly had me in stitches.

Trump and his House toadies tried everything to stack the deck against Smith. He wanted a public hearing, but was refused. Meanwhile, in the run up to his Dec. 17 closed-door appearance, Trump called him “deranged,” a “thug,” a “criminal,” and a “disgrace to humanity.” But Smith, a career adherent to evidentiary facts and the rule of law, was not deterred. Here he was, in the opening minutes of the hearing:

“Jan. 6 was an attack on the structure of our democracy…Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power…The timing and the speed of our work reflects the strength of the evidence and our confidence that we would have secured convictions at trial.”

A House Republican staffer (whose name was redacted) didn’t like that. The staffer said: “But your final report makes what seems to be conclusive determinations of President Trump’s guilt, as opposed to laying out simply the facts and the evidence that you have. I mean, you draw those conclusions that in your view he’s guilty…You would agree that it’s the role of a jury to weigh the facts and determine guilt?”

Smith’s reply: Yes, he’s quite familiar with juries - but he never got near a jury. As he pointed out, “the cases were never tried.” There was no federal jury trial because Trump successfully campaigned in ‘24 that there should be no federal jury trial. Then his office was closed down. All of which made the staffer look pretty stupid, regaling Smith about “the role of a jury.”

So the staffer tried another tack: Trump repeatedly claimed in the weeks prior to Jan. 6 that the ‘20 election was stolen, but can you prosecute someone for speaking his mind? “The president’s statements that he believed the election was rife with fraud - those certainly are statements that are protected by the First Amendment, correct?”

Smith: “Absolutely not.” He proceeded to educate the staffer: “If (the statements) are made to target a lawful government function” - the peaceful transfer of power - “and they are made with knowing falsity, then no, they are not” protected by the First Amendment. He later explained: “When you’re committing a fraud - meaning you’re not just saying something that’s untrue, you’re saying it knowing it’s untrue or with reckless disregard for the truth - that’s not protected by the First Amendment. People commit crimes all the time using words. When someone…commits an ‘affinity fraud’ - where you try to gain someone’s trust, get them to trust you as a general matter, and then you rip them off - you defraud them. And in a lot of ways this case was an affinity fraud. The president had people who had built up trust in him, including people in his own party, and he preyed on that,” by stoking followers to violently storm the Capitol, armed with lies about a stolen election.

Stymied again, the staffer tried another tack: “I mean, there’s a long list of disputed elections, I mean, the election of 1800, 1960, year 2000, where candidates believed they were wronged by the - you know, because they lost. And there’s a long history of candidates speaking out about (that). And I think you would agree that those types of statements are sort of at the core of the First Amendment rights of a presidential candidate, right?”

Apparently this redacted inquisitor never learned history; the losers of those three elections - John Adams, Richard Nixon, and Al Gore - accepted the results and endorsed the peaceful transfer of power. And none of them sent their followers to storm the government. Smith didn’t feel the need to cite those details; he merely replied, “There is no historical analog for what President Trump did in this case. As we said in the indictment, he was free to say that he thought he won the election…But what he was not free to do was violate federal law and knowingly use false statements about ‘election fraud’ to target a lawful government function. That he was not allowed to do. And that differentiates this case from any past history.”

The staffer then tried another tack: Trump had merely heeded what his close advisors told him. “People come into the Oval Office - I mean, the president isn’t conducting his own due diligence. He is receiving people in his office that are telling him these things (about election fraud in the swing states)…And, you know, for the most part, he is just receiving this information and, you know, his statements are almost just regurgitating what these people have told him. I mean, isn’t that the case?”

Smith: “No,” that wasn’t the case. Smith had lined up numerous witnesses - all Republicans - who tried to tell Trump that the ‘20 results were legit. Trump reached out to many of them, including the top Republicans in swing state Arizona, only to be told what he didn’t want to hear. “There was a pattern in our case where 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…Another example, sir, is the folks from Michigan. He invited them to the White House. They told him, ‘You lost because you underperformed with educated females.’ They told him that when he brought them there.” Smith said these Republican witnesses “put country before party,” and “would have had great weight and great credibility with a jury.”

Later in the day Smith piled it on: “The pattern and the depth of the pattern and the length of the pattern was pretty damning evidence that he knew (his stolen election claims) were false. He only brought ‘fraud’ claims in states in states that he lost. When he was told that a ‘fraud’ claim wasn’t true, he didn’t stop making it…claims that were so outlandish and so just fantastical, continuing to push those claims after they’d been disabused, was strong evidence (for) our case…False claims about dead voters. It would be false claims about underage voters. It would be false claims about illegal alien voters.”

At this point, the House Republican inquisitor was flailing. How come Smith was so “laser focused only on President Trump”? Wasn’t Smith part of a political conspiracy to hurt Trump’s ‘24 candidacy, “keeping him off the campaign trail”?

Smith replied: “All of that is false.” He cared only about the evidence he’d amassed, not the campaign calendar. And particularly with respect to Jan. 6, “the evidence made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy. These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit…Our view of the evidence was that he caused it and that he exploited it.”

OK, let’s take a breath.

If you’ve read this far, you’re likely wondering whether the effort was even worth it. Jack Smith’s case feels like ancient history, the rule of law has no more value than a clump of soiled tissue, and Generalissimo Bone Spurs is off the leash and plotting imperial conquest in the southern hemisphere.

But if you have read this far, you may well believe - as do I, having invested the time to write at length - that it’s vitally important to do whatever we can, however modest those efforts might be, to document Trump’s criminality for the historical record, in the fervent hope that future Americans will be free to listen and learn.

Because, as Smith warned during his testimony, if there’s no accountability, even in the rear-view mirror, for what Trump did to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power, “it becomes the new norm.” That would be, in his word, “catastrophic.” And that’s why I wrote this.