Against forgetting ...

Jack Smith (what a bland Anglo name!) was the very professional prosecutor called upon to consider and if necessary indict Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection on January 6 2020 and then stealing classified documents when he left the White House. Smith did his job. Trump escaped the law only when the American people, in our folly, restored him to the presidency.

Smith told his side of that story to a Congressional committee last month. Republicans kept his sworn testimony behind closed doors and only released a written transcript on New Years Eve, counting on the country being distracted. This has worked -- if we let it.

The diligent journalist Parker Malloy had a better fate in mind for Smith's story: 

I spent the holiday reading through the whole thing. Here’s what they didn’t want you to see.

Here are some of the tidbits she extracted from the 255 page transcript:

Trump is a crook:

“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. 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. He then repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.”

Trump didn't care who, including and perhaps especially his Vice President, got hurt in order to keep him in office:  

“Now, once they were at the Capitol and once the attack on the Capitol happened, he refused to stop it. He instead issued a tweet that without question in my mind endangered the life of his own Vice President. And when the violence was going on, 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 were his political allies, to further delay the proceedings.” 

Smith had built his dismissed case from testimony by Republicans:

“And, in fact, one of the strengths of our case and why we felt we had such strong proof is 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.’ The Speaker of the House in Arizona. The Speaker of the House in Michigan. We had an elector in Pennsylvania who is a former Congressman who was going to be an elector for President Trump who said that what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal. Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party.” 

Trump's allies had even concluded that people who stood in their way in falsely swinging the vote to Trump in Pennsylvania should be killed.

“And there was a text chain with some of the people who were carrying out this scheme for President Trump basically ended with, ‘These people should be shot,’ because — ‘and that we can’t let this snowball like this; otherwise, we’re going to have to do this in all the other States.’”

Parker Malloy has excerpted the vital parts of Smith's testimony at The Present Age. That testimony is not (ever?) going to be highlighted in the mainstream, but you can read this and great deal more there.