The sworn record of a criminal case America chose to ignore.
Author’s Note: This is my last article of 2025. I wrote it yesterday and it’s my last article that will be looking backward at the events of this past year. From now on I’ll be focusing on 2028 and beyond.
The full transcript was released today of Jack Smith’s behind-closed-doors deposition before the House Judiciary Committee.
He spoke the words the way veterans of long wars sometimes speak of battles: plainly, without ornament, and without needing you to believe him. The former special counsel sat beneath the fluorescent lights of a Rayburn deposition room, his tie tightened as if someone had cinched it an extra notch, and he said: “We had proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” The temperature in the room did not change. No one gasped. But the sentence should have been seismic.
Jack Smith was describing a case that will never be tried.
For nearly three hours, Members of Congress took turns attacking him, praising him, or pretending he wasn’t there. What Smith did — and what he tried to do — somehow mattered less, in that room, than what Donald Trump thinks he deserves in return. But for anyone who still cares about the core bargain of a republic — that power is restrained by law — the transcript is a window into what nearly happened in America, and what still might.
Smith, sworn in under penalty of perjury, testified that his team gathered evidence sufficient to convict a former President of the United States of federal crimes: a criminal conspiracy to overturn the results of an election, obstruction of justice,