Jack Smith did his job

Until 2015, I shied away from political news. Growing up, I paid scant attention to history, civics or government classes. They didn’t land in a way that connected with anything real in my life. This is as much an indictment of curriculum as it is my own callowness.

Once I reached the appropriate age, I always voted, but I may not have always voted with the best preparation.

I admit this with a fair amount of shame, but 2015 changed all that. A man rode DOWN an escalator, and I snapped to attention. He made fun of a disabled person. He told handlers at a rally to “knock the crap” out of a heckler. He joked about getting away with sexual assault. “They let you do it.”

He maniacally claimed that he “alone could fix it.” He pushed the idea of “America first,” which now rings like an incomplete and hollow thought because what he meant was “Me first. My interests, my need for power.”

Contrast such bombast with the eight-plus hours of Jack Smith’s deposition to the House Judiciary Committee. It was helpful to watch the video and follow along on the transcript. It was gripping to see a public servant testify how he followed “the facts and the law” in his role as former Special Counsel to the US Department of Justice.

The video and transcript were released at the end of 2025, and there was a lot of speculation that it was timed in such a way to disappear amid holiday celebrations.

Au contraire! Trying to shoehorn it in a corner of last-calendar days didn’t work very well. A lot of people watched and read and listened and learned that Jack Smith knows his sh*t and Jim Jordan doesn’t.

The momentum was suddenly broken, though, when we learned that our military swept into Venezuela and took President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to the U.S. Kidnapped is the correct word.

What’s happened in the waters outside of Venezuela and now on land will be the subject of discussion for weeks, as it should be, but I don’t want to lose focus on Jack Smith’s work, either.

People forget that Smith had two big jobs in his role: investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and investigating the documents 45/47 stole when he begrudgingly left office.

The public has now had the chance to learn about J6, aka Volume One of Smith’s investigations, but Volume Two, the documents case, remains sealed under injunction. This case concerns 32 counts against the president for “willful retention of national defense information” regarding “classified documents.”

As an archivist, this case has held special interest for me. Ten months ago, I wrote about the Presidential Records Act and how records created during a presidency belong to the people of the United States and not to the president, that such documents were to be deposited with the National Archives.

45/47 explicitly and expressly flouted the law. Boxes were removed to Mar-a-Lago, some of which ended up in a bathroom, and they were the subject of a famous photograph. The worst places to keep valuable documents are in areas of high humidity and temperature extremes. A bathroom would qualify as a worst place.

As bad a place as the bathroom is for document storage, no place — as in disposal, as in the documents being “no place” — would be worse. I’m sure I’m not the only archivist who has wondered about the current location of those boxes.

One of the members of the Judiciary Committee tried to say that the missing documents case was mishandled because Smith’s team had reorganized the materials in the boxes and that violated “exact order.”

A foundational principle in the archives profession is to respect original order, which is not the same as exact order because exact order infers some state of perfection that doesn’t exist anywhere in reality. It’s not just my experience, but that of many archivists, that original order (or even order of any kind) is an ideal. If it exists, we respect it, but it occurs far less often than people suppose.

So the questioner wanted to trap Smith, to assert that he and his team had done damage to the documents case by disturbing the contents of the boxes. Smith blew that assertion out of the water. His team called them “Beautiful Mind” boxes, referencing the 2001 film.

Smith said that classified documents were interspersed with clippings, items of clothing, and memorabilia. If that’s what the president considers order, I will eat a red hat with white lettering, imagining that MAGA stands for “My Appetite Got Angry.”

Also, Smith nicely skewered this faux fastidiousness when he said, “the litigation, in this case, in my view, was not going to turn on the location of documents in the boxes, given his position was, ‘All of this is mine.’”

That’s 45/47’s default position whether it’s documents, women, or other countries: All of this is mine.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that when the boxes arrived at Mar-a-Lago, the president waved around classified documents like party favors. One such document concerned ongoing military operations, which he showed to numerous people.

One of those operations involved “a senior military official [who] purportedly feared that Trump might order an attack on Country A, and the senior military official advised Trump against doing so.”

In his first administration, there were enough military leaders with experience to restrain the president from ordering such an attack. With the recent attack on Venezuela, we have learned what happens when those safeguards are gone.

So, we return to Venezuela, as we should, but let’s not forget the unfinished documents business. As Smith testified, if the president “was intending to take classified documents that he had no authority to take and he did it intentionally because he wanted to start a Presidential library and keep these documents in the locations that we talked about today, that’s a crime.”

A crime to add to all the others.

Joan Zwagerman writes from Storm Lake.