In America, the Law Should be King.
Jack Smith’s findings, Trump’s own words, and the evidence behind two federal prosecutions — in plain English.
The founders did not overthrow a king to place a president above the law. They created an elected office whose occupant could be held accountable for abusing his power.
Thomas Paine helped make independence a cause ordinary Americans could understand and embrace. His revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, published in 1776, challenged hereditary monarchy and helped rally public support for breaking with Britain. His vision placed the law above any individual ruler:
“In America the law is king.… For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” — Thomas Paine.
That principle reaches beyond rejecting a hereditary crown. Electing a leader does not entitle him to govern as though the law exists only for everyone else.
Defending the Constitution in Federalist №69, Alexander Hamilton explained that a president removed through impeachment would remain subject to prosecution and punishment under ordinary law. Presidential power came with personal responsibility.
“The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” — Alexander Hamilton, Federalist №69, March 14, 1788.
Federalist №69, March 14, 1788.
That principle should require no partisan interpretation. The presidency is a public trust, not a license to commit crimes. A man does not acquire ownership of the government because he leads it, or ownership of an election because he refuses to lose it. Americans owe their allegiance to the Constitution. No president is entitled to demand that loyalty to him replace obedience to the law. A [democratic republic] cannot survive on the understanding that the law applies to everyone except the man powerful enough to escape it.
After reviewing the public record, my conclusion is straightforward: the evidence makes a compelling case that Donald Trump instigated and exploited January 6 to retain power, and deliberately kept national defense documents he had no right to possess. The cases deserved a jury’s verdict. They never received one.
That distinction matters. Trump denied wrongdoing and was not convicted in either federal case. An indictment is an accusation; a prosecutor’s conclusion is not a verdict. But the absence of a trial is no certificate of innocence, either.
The Jack Smith Report
“The admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.” — Jack Smith
In his final election report, Smith concluded that “the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.” He explained that Trump’s return to the presidency, and the Justice Department’s policy against prosecuting a sitting president, stopped the case. The office had not abandoned its assessment of the evidence.
An election confers an office. It does not retroactively make unlawful conduct lawful.
Nor were these charges merely Smith’s personal accusations. Federal grand juries returned indictments in both cases. They agreed with the prosecution that there was sufficient basis to bring criminal charges. To be precise, their finding was probable cause, a lower standard than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Grand juries hear the prosecution’s presentation; they do not conduct a full adversarial trial. Their decisions justified prosecution, not a declaration of guilt.
That is why a trial mattered.
January 6 becomes easier to understand when we stop pretending the story began with a speech.
The election indictment describes a coordinated effort to overturn a result Trump had lost. It alleges that he continued promoting fraud claims after his own advisers and officials explained they were false; pressured state officials to change outcomes; worked with others to assemble fraudulent electoral slates in seven states; and pressed Mike Pence to reject legitimate electoral votes or send them back to the states.
Trump had every right to challenge election results through lawful procedures. He had no right to substitute fabricated electoral votes for the real ones. Believing you should have won does not give you ownership of everyone else’s ballot.
On January 2, 2021, Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger: “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” The recorded exchange leaves no ambiguity about the number he requested: exactly one more than Biden’s 11,779-vote margin of victory. Raffensperger and his staff repeatedly rejected Trump’s false fraud claims. Yet Trump kept pressing for the votes necessary to reverse his defeat. A president entrusted with protecting an election was demanding that a state official produce the outcome he wanted.
Then came the public mobilization.
On December 19, Trump summoned supporters to Washington for January 6: “Be there, will be wild!” On January 6, he directed them toward the Capitol. At 2:24 p.m., with the attack underway, he tweeted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage” to do what Trump wanted. The January 6 committee’s report documents the message and its dangerous context.
Consider that choice. His vice president was in danger. Congress was under attack. Trump chose that moment to brand Pence a coward for refusing to overturn the result.
During the attack, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) urged Trump to call off the rioters. According to Republican Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA), who said McCarthy described the exchange to her, Trump replied: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” The January 6 committee’s report includes this account.
Trump did issue messages urging peaceful behavior and support for police. He had also used peaceful language during his rally speech. Those facts belong in an honest account. So does the committee’s finding that he resisted repeated pleas to tell the attackers to leave, finally doing so in a video at 4:17 p.m. The question is what his conduct, taken as a whole, reveals — not whether one sentence can be isolated to excuse everything surrounding it.
Smith was explicit in his December 2025 congressional testimony:
“Our view of the evidence was that he caused it and that he exploited it and that it was foreseeable to him.”
That is the prosecution’s assessment, not a jury finding. It is also a devastating answer to the fantasy that Trump merely wandered into a crisis created by strangers.
There is a legal distinction worth confronting directly. Smith did not charge incitement to insurrection. His report identifies uncertain precedent, a demanding constitutional standard, and the absence of direct evidence that Trump intended the full scope of the violence. Prosecutors instead charged conspiracy, obstruction, and interference with voting rights. Calling Trump an instigator is an argument about his responsibility; it must not be misrepresented as a conviction for an offense Smith declined to charge.
The larger case remains: a president sought to defeat the voters’ decision and treated the disruption of Congress as useful to that effort.
Temporary Accoubtability
The criminal consequences of January 6 were substantial — and established in court. By January 6, 2025, approximately 1,583 people had been charged and 1,270 convicted, through guilty pleas or trials. These cases ranged from unlawful entry to assaults on police and organized efforts to stop the transfer of power.
Fourteen defendants were convicted of seditious conspiracy: ten by juries and four through guilty pleas. These were criminal convictions for conspiracies involving force against government authority — not merely accusations of holding objectionable political views.
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On January 20, 2025, Trump commuted the sentences of 14 named defendants to time served and pardoned everyone else convicted of covered January 6 offenses. He also directed the Justice Department to seek dismissal of pending cases. The blanket pardon therefore covered more than 1,250 convicted defendants; the remaining cases were addressed through commutations or dismissal.
Among those pardoned was former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy and other offenses. Ten of the 14 people receiving commutations had also been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Trump extended clemency even to people convicted of conspiring to use force against the government whose leadership he was reclaiming.
A pardon is an exercise of presidential power, not a judicial finding of innocence. Those convictions cannot honestly be rewritten as proof that nothing criminal happened. The president who benefited from the effort to overturn the election subsequently used his office to relieve its participants of the consequences. That is a damning statement about what — and whom — he chose to protect.
The Documents Case
The documents case exposes the same proprietary attitude toward public power.
Under the Presidential Records Act, as explained by the National Archives, official presidential records belong to the United States. At the end of a presidency, their custody passes to the Archivist. Personal diaries are different from records of government business. A president cannot simply turn official records into private property by calling them personal.
The presidency comes with responsibilities, not a moving allowance for the nation’s secrets.
Keeping official presidential records outside lawful custody violated the ownership and custody framework of the Presidential Records Act. But precision matters: that act was not the criminal statute under which Smith charged Trump. The criminal case concerned willful retention of national defense information under the Espionage Act, along with obstruction and false statements. “Stealing documents” is an everyday description of taking and keeping what belongs to the public; the charged retention offense had specific elements prosecutors still had to prove.
The documents indictment alleged that Trump directed boxes to be moved before his lawyer searched for subpoenaed records, leaving the lawyer unaware that boxes had been withheld from that search. After a certification of compliance, the FBI recovered another 102 documents bearing classification markings during its August 2022 search.
That sequence is why the case cannot honestly be reduced to a packing mistake. The accusation was deliberate concealment after demands for return.
Trump’s own recorded words are even harder to explain away. Discussing a military document at Bedminster in July 2021, he said:
“See as president I could have declassified it.”
“Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
The indictment quotes the exchange. It is evidence of awareness: awareness that the material remained secret, and awareness that his presidential authority had ended.
The relevant Espionage Act provision, 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), covers unauthorized possession and willful retention of documents relating to national defense, coupled with failure to deliver them to the officials entitled to receive them. This offense does not require proof that the defendant sold secrets or worked for a foreign government.
Nor does the statute simply criminalize possession of a page stamped “classified.” Prosecutors must establish the applicable elements, including national defense information and willfulness. Classification is relevant evidence, but classification status and criminal liability are not identical questions.
That demolishes the lazy defense that there could be no crime unless Trump was caught handing a suitcase to a foreign spy.
Then there is the claim that he could declassify material “by thinking about it.” Government does not operate by telepathy.
The ordinary declassification system has procedures for recording and communicating a decision. The implementing rules, including 32 C.F.R. § 2001.25, prescribe markings identifying the authority and date; when markings cannot be affixed, holders or recipients receive written instructions. Agencies need to know whether information is still protected.
A president has broad authority over ordinary executive-branch classified information, and the extent to which every administrative formality binds the president is legally contested. It would therefore overstate the law to claim that every conceivable presidential declassification requires one identical notification procedure.
In its September 2022 ruling, the Eleventh Circuit found no evidence in the record that the documents had been declassified.
But having authority to declassify is not evidence that declassification actually occurred. Trump did not substantiate a completed process for the seized records. In its September 2022 ruling, the Eleventh Circuit found no evidence in the record that the documents had been declassified. It also explained that declassification would not make official documents personal property.
Nuclear secrets face additional restrictions. Certain nuclear information is protected by the Atomic Energy Act, rather than merely by a president’s executive order. A president cannot simply bypass that statutory system by announcing that everything is declassified.
This was not an abstract concern. The documents indictment identified a document concerning U.S. nuclear weaponry marked Secret/Formerly Restricted Data. Despite its misleading name, Formerly Restricted Data remains classified. “Formerly” describes a change in legal category, not permission to display it to guests.
Nothing about leaving office transformed national defense information into a private collection.
Wait, no trial?
Given the overwhelming *public* evidence, then, why was there no documents trial? Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the prosecution on grounds concerning Smith’s appointment. She did not conduct a trial and find that Trump had returned everything, declassified everything, or obstructed nothing. The appeal as to Trump was subsequently abandoned following his reelection. Cannon later blocked release of the documents volume of Smith’s report.
Conclusion
The evidence warrants a severe judgment of Trump’s conduct. The legal system owed the country a fair opportunity to test that evidence in court. Respecting the presumption of innocence does not require citizens to suspend their judgment of the public record. It requires us to distinguish our judgment from a verdict that never occurred.
Smith stated the governing principle when announcing the documents charges in June 2023:
“We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”
A president is entrusted with power that belongs to the people. He does not own their votes, their government, or their secrets. If the most powerful man receives an exemption unavailable to everyone else, equal justice becomes a slogan painted over privilege. Such an exemption betrays our Founders and all who fought, sacrificed, and died for freedom.
No one should be above the law. Not a president. Not a billionaire. Not Donald Trump. No one. Orwell’s works were meant as a warning, not a Republican playbook. In America, the law should be king.
