Five years ago today, a violent mob stormed the United States Capitol in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election. The man who incited them has since been re-elected president, which scuppered the investigation into him by Special Counsel Jack Smith. If that whiplash isn’t enough to give you vertigo, consider this: we now have sworn testimony, under oath, from the prosecutor who investigated Trump laying out exactly why his office believed they could convict—and why they were stopped.
Former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s December testimony before the House Judiciary Committee is the closest thing we’ll get to the trial that should have happened. In it, Smith methodically dismantles every defense Trump and his allies have offered, explains how the case was built on testimony from Republicans willing to put country over party, and makes clear that the evidence of Trump’s guilt wasn’t circumstantial—it was direct.
In this post, I’m breaking down the key takeaways from Smith’s testimony, sharing one of my AI #MiniHistory videos marking the anniversary, and giving you a way to interrogate the evidence yourself through an interactive NotebookLM bot. Because if there’s one thing the incoming administration is counting on, it’s that you won’t have time to read 255 pages of testimony. Let’s make sure they’re wrong.
January 6 in 40 seconds
But first, a J6 refresher course — again, for busy folks.
I’ve been into making these little AI #MiniHistory videos with Glif agents, trying to tease out important signposts along our road to dictatorship and other interesting moments in history to highlight. Here’s the one I did for today and the 5th anniversary of January 6, 2021:
Trump has still never been held accountable for his actions that day — the election of 2024 put a boot in the face of any hope for justice prevailing against the Chief Insurrectionist. Nevertheless, Jack Smith replanted a tendril of hope in his mid-December testimony to Congress with a scathingly clear broken record message that Trump was guilty and they had all the receipts they needed to prove it and then some. It lays down new tracks in the Congressional record that will be impossible to expunge, regardless of whatever trash MAGA fairy tale of J6 the right-wing goons decide to slather on the White House website.
Jack Smith testifies to Trump’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt”
In eight hours of testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on December 17, 2025, former Special Counsel Jack Smith laid out why his office was prepared to convict Donald Trump on federal charges. Speaking under oath in a closed-door deposition — the Republicans who now hold the gavel had denied his request to testify publicly (after crying decades of crocodile tears over ‘transparency’?? truly?) —Smith called Trump “the most culpable and most responsible person” in the criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.
Smith was unequivocal about the strength of the evidence. “There is no historical analog for what President Trump did in this case,” he told lawmakers. Trump was free to claim he’d won the election, even falsely. “But what he was not free to do was violate federal law and use knowing—knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function.”
Crucially, Smith emphasized that the case against Trump wasn’t built on partisan opposition. “Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party,” he said—including a Pennsylvania elector and former congressman who told investigators that what Trump’s team was attempting “was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal.” Smith also told lawmakers multiple times that he could prove Trump knew the claims he was making about election fraud were false.
Smith testified that his office felt confidence they had direct evidence of Trump’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and that they would have secured a conviction at trial for both illegal acts: the criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election, and the willful retention of highly classified documents after leaving office.
Jack Smith’s ethical and prosecutorial framework
The evidence was particularly strong, which helped keep momentum in the investigation high and ultimately result in a growing body of evidence of Trump’s guilt and culpability in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
Ask Jack Smith yourself with this bot
At 255 pages, the Jack Smith testimony isn’t exactly light bedtime reading for busy people (or any people, really). The testimony transcript is actually longer than the Jack Smith Report itself, at 175 pages. And taken together, it’s a lot of work to commit to a full read. Ain’t nobody got time for that (except a few precious wonks and, if that’s you, you can literally watch all 8 hours of testimony at the end of this post).
So, instead, you can “ask Jack Smith’ specific questions here in this notebook bot — or at least, you can ask his testimony and his findings in the Volume 1 Report. Ask it for a 5 minute summary if that’s all the time you have. Go deeper if you can. The White House today launched a full-on North Korea-style retcon job of a website exalting the events of January 6, thinking they can simply bury the truth of what happened that day in their volumes of shit.
The party that screamed bloody murder for decades about censorship allegedly rampant on the Left seem to be completely fine with skipping right over into the full-on Orwellian Newspeak and oligarchs owning all the media outlets phase of an authoritarian power grab themselves, turns out.
Interact with the Jack Smith book report and testimony transcript notebook here:
Jack Smith’s Testimony to Congress and Volume 1 Findings
Five years on, the facts of January 6 haven’t changed—only the political will to act on them. Jack Smith’s testimony stands as a meticulous, sworn record of what happened and who was responsible. It’s a prosecutorial roadmap that leads directly to Donald Trump, built not on partisan overreach but on the testimony of many lifelong Republicans who chose truth over tribe — at great personal risk and in the face of targeted harassment.
The Trump 2.0 administration can rewrite websites. They can flood the zone with revisionist propaganda. They can pardon the foot soldiers and rehabilitate the ringleaders. What they can’t do is unswear testimony, unsay what was said under oath, or erase the Congressional record.
This is why documentation matters. This is why tools like the NotebookLM bot above exist—so that anyone, regardless of how much time they have, can access the primary sources and draw their own conclusions. The authoritarian playbook depends on exhaustion and amnesia. Don’t give them either.
Jack Smith did his job. The courts failed to do theirs in time. History, at least, will have the receipts — 8 hours of them in fact, as per below.
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