Release Jack Smith’s Report
The outgoing administration shouldn’t play along with the whitewashing of January 6th.
You can never really tell which of the wacky ideas that Trump spins up will end up forgotten in a few days and which will lodge like a splinter in his brain forever. During his first term, “We’re gonna buy Greenland” seemed like it belonged to the former category. Now, it seems he’s making it a top administration priority.
“I am hearing that the people of Greenland are ‘MAGA,’” Trump wrote yesterday. “My son, Don Jr, and various representatives, will be traveling there to visit some of the most magnificent areas and sights. Greenland is an incredible place, and the people will benefit tremendously if, and when, it becomes part of our Nation. We will protect it, and cherish it, from a very vicious outside World. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!”
Happy Tuesday.
Release the Smith Report
by William Kristol
Last night, Donald Trump’s lawyers demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland block the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on his two investigations, one on Trump and January 6th, the other on Trump’s handling of the classified documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago.
The attorney general will surely refuse Trump’s demand. Justice Department regulations require special counsels to submit reports explaining their legal decisions at the end of their investigations. Just as Garland last year released Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, he’ll make public—with appropriate redactions—Smith’s report on Trump. (For that matter, we can also expect the attorney general to release special counsel David Weiss’s final report on his investigation of the now-pardoned Hunter Biden.)
Trump’s demand that Smith’s report be suppressed is a useful reminder that he really hates truthful accounts of January 6th, even if—especially if—they are based on testimony under oath from many different individuals, including many who worked for him. Recall Trump’s fear and loathing of the House January 6th Committee.
The loathing is, I suppose, easily understandable. Politicians don’t like scrutiny. And they especially don’t like criticism. And those who’ve gone so far as to commit sordid and likely criminal acts don’t like to see their disreputable behavior exposed.
But one senses that in addition to the hatred and the loathing, there’s an element of fear. Why?
Trump won. Smith’s report won’t change that. And in any case, his entire propaganda machine is ready to attack the report as the product of a biased Biden Justice Department and a Trump-hating special prosecutor. The report will have no immediate effect on public opinion, nor on the successes or failures of the opening days of Trump’s presidency.
Still, Trump knows how crucial his rewriting of the history of January 6th was to his victory in November. If most Republicans had held to their original judgment of January 6th as a day of shame—if they had continued to believe that it was what Trump the very next day called a “heinous attack” that “defiled the seat of American democracy”—Trump would not have been the 2024 GOP nominee. If most Americans had thought January 6th not just an unfortunate event but a disqualifying disgrace, Trump wouldn’t have won the general election.
The whitewashing of January 6th was key to Trump’s political comeback.
And Trump has the sense—and I think he’s right about this—that he must make sure that January 6th stays whitewashed for the sake of his political success going forward.
In the mid-twentieth century, Southern segregationists could have chosen simply to defend their policies as appropriate for then-current circumstances. They did make such arguments. But they also understood that in politics, present legitimacy depends on past origins. It was important to advocates of 20th century policies of racial discrimination that those policies were defended against the backdrop of the nobility of the Southern effort in the “War Between the States,” the depredations of Reconstruction, and the historic legitimacy of states’ rights.
So Trump too will continue to seek to rewrite the history of January 6th. He’ll pardon those who stormed the Capitol. He’ll fill the ranks of his administration with January 6th truthers. His administration will attack those, from Liz Cheney to Jack Smith, who’ve sought to hold him accountable. Trump’s more respectable apologists won’t go all the way with him in celebrating January 6th, but they’ll ignore or minimize or excuse what happened.
In a sense, the release now of Smith’s report will simply signify the failure of the effort, over the last four years, of accountability and truth-telling about January 6th. It will be the last gasp, for now, of a lost cause.
But, as T.S. Eliot remarked, “there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory.”
Who knows if or when such a victory will come? But if American politics is ever to return to a condition of civic and political health, it will need to embrace an honest account of January 6th.
Which is why we need the release of the special counsel’s report.
Doing the Boring Right Thing
by Andrew Egger
January 6th, the date of the certification of the presidential election, is always an important day. But when things are working correctly, it should be a boring one. Yesterday, the outgoing, defeated administration gave us a boring day.
Four years after Mike Pence’s certification of the 2020 election was an epoch-making event, Kamala Harris’s certification of the 2024 results went off without a hitch.
“It was about what should be the norm and what the American people should be able to take for granted, which is that one of the most important pillars of our democracy is that there will be a peaceful transfer of power,” Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters shortly after presiding over the certification. “Today, America’s democracy stood.”
Obviously, there is tension here. The man whose victory Harris certified is also the individual she repeatedly warned during the campaign posed an existential threat to democracy—someone who tried his best to break and overturn it four years ago to the day. The government will soon be back in the grip of a man and a movement with nothing but scorn for our norms and institutions.
It came as no surprise that Trump gave Harris no credit for honoring his victory in a way he refused to honor Biden’s. As the certification was taking place, the president-elect was grousing that “Biden is doing everything possible to make the TRANSITION as difficult as possible, from Lawfare such as has never been seen before, to costly and ridiculous Executive Orders on the Green New Scam and other money wasting Hoaxes.” Surely Trump can imagine something else Biden could have done to make the transition more difficult.
The asymmetry here is corrosive. When one side has completely abandoned all respect for norms like the peaceful transfer of power, they also damage their opponents’ ability to effectively uphold those norms. By spitting on the grace extended by Harris in upholding her ceremonial duties, Trump tries to make her look like a dupe, leering at her for extending him a courtesy we all know he would never offer in reverse. It can be demoralizing for Trump's foes, as their leaders go through the motions of a normal handoff, to wonder if their party is blinding itself to impending dangers or fighting with one hand tied behind its back.
But the fact that Trump has made these norms seem hollow is no reason for the rest of us to abandon them too. Standing up for the peaceful transition, as Harris did yesterday, is a thankless job when the transition is going to someone so manifestly unfit. But it remains a noble one—in ways that can be hard to see in the moment.
Earlier this week, Politico’s Michael Kruse reported a remarkable exchange between two former vice presidents, Al Gore and Mike Pence. Last summer, the two men crossed paths at a memorial service for the late Sen. Joe Lieberman. Gore thanked Pence for his courageous actions four years ago. Here’s Kruse’s reporting of the interaction:
Pence, on the other side of the political aisle but in the same set of pews, said something surprising in response. He suggested to Gore he had done what he’d done on Jan. 6, 2021 in part because of what he had seen as a newly sworn-in member of Congress on Jan. 6, 2001. He had witnessed a vice president like him stand up to pressure from his own party to defy the Constitution even though doing so by definition meant personal defeat.
“I never forgot it,” Pence said to Gore, in the recollection of a Pence ally.
“You don’t know how much that means,” Gore said, “coming from you.”
We may be at a point right now when the political rewards for standing up for the institutions of democracy themselves seem smallest while the rewards for turning everything into a contest of raw political power seem greatest. But quietly doing the right thing, even when the immediate reward seems small, can reverberate in unforeseeable ways. That’s what Gore did two decades ago, and it’s what Harris did yesterday: a small good thing in service of maintaining a place to come back to. We can’t know yet when we’ll need it, but we may.
Quick Hits
CRAMMING IT ALL IN: Trifectas in Washington don’t come around very often, and they don’t stick around long. With the midterm elections just two years away, Republicans know they need to move fast to pass as much of Trump’s domestic policy agenda as possible. But as Politico notes this morning, they’re divided over the best strategy for carrying that agenda forward. New Senate Majority Leader John Thune has pushed for passing a border bill as quickly as possible, with a taxes and tariffs package to follow later in the year; House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose caucus is squirrelier, has favored a shock-and-awe approach of larding many of Trump’s second-term priorities into one massive package.
On Sunday, Trump endorsed the latter approach: “one powerful Bill that will bring our Country back, and make it greater than ever before,” he wrote. But many senators—recalling Trump’s history of on-a-dime strategic flip-flops—remain unsure he’s fully committed to that path. When Politico asked Sen. Tommy Tuberville to describe what Trump wanted, he responded with a quip: “What day is it?” Sure enough, Trump has now said he is open to either approach.
NATIONALISTS OF THE GLOBE UNITE, PART ONE MILLION: We’re quickly getting to the point where it will be easier to list off the countries whose domestic politics Elon Musk isn’t trying to influence from afar.
His spat with various figures in UK politics continues to grow, as he has spent time this week feuding with leaders in three different parties there: asserting that Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the Labor Party should be in prison, denouncing Liberal Democrats leader Ed Davey as a “sniveling cretin,” and scoffing that Reform UK leader Nigel Farage does “not have what it takes” to helm the right-wing populist party.
He’s waded into Canadian politics too, gloating repeatedly this week about the downfall of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and praising opposition leader Pierre Poilievre. Just yesterday, his attention span wandered over Argentina’s Javier Milei and Norway’s Progress Party. “More and more people around the world are choosing the red pill and leaving the matrix of lies,” he tweeted.
But there remain so many other nations to discover! Why meddle only in the Western hemisphere when one’s ambitions are galactic? Responding to a video showing a large gathering of South Koreans rallying to President Yoon Suk Yeol’s side amid his impending arrest, Musk posted: “Wild times in Korea! What is actually the crux of the issue?”
Cheap Shots
Andrew, what really cracked me up yesterday were the back to back stories about the Trump transition. First, you have Suzie Wiles (incoming Chief of Staff) praising the Biden transition team for being so helpful followed by Trump blasting the Biden transition team for "making everything as difficult as possible." These reports were about an hour apart from one another.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5069623-trump-chief-of-staff-susies-wiles-jeff-zients/
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5069356-trump-transition-biden-criticism/
"Greenland is an incredible place, and the people will benefit tremendously if, and when, it becomes part of our Nation. We will protect it, and cherish it, from a very vicious outside World."
This sounds like the rapist's pitch to female voters, which was essentially: "I will protect women whether they want it or not." Which sounds off when coming from a rapist. I think Greenland is very aware this is the geopolitical analog of a rapist promising them protection, whether they want it or not.
"If American politics is ever to return to a condition of civic and political health, it will need to embrace an honest account of January 6th.
Which is why we need the release of the special counsel’s report."
Should we release the report? Yes. But expecting it to change anything is a bridge too far. The election is over, and this will change zero minds. Even if it did change any minds, it's too late. But it won't. Everyone is either dug into their interpretation of January 6 or just doesn't care, and a report four years after the events is not going to move the needle. If there is any impact, it will be to increase polarization, because one side knows what happened and is appalled, and the other side pretends it was something else and either ignores evidence to the contrary or uses that evidence to somehow blame the other side. Release it, but do so with zero expectations that it will break anyone out of their delusions or their indifference.