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‘Frankly sick’: Conservatives fume over release of Jack Smith report on Trump’s 2020 election plot

Republicans rubbish special counsel’s findings on president-elect’s attempt to overthrow democracy as ‘not a big deal’, labelling it instead ‘a one-sided, prosecutor’s version of reality’

Joe Sommerlad
Tuesday 14 January 2025 17:23 GMT
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Trump blasts Jack Smith's 'fake' report as judge blocks its release

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Conservative media has reacted with scorn to the decision by US Attorney General Merrick Garland to release Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report into Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election.

Smith, who announced his resignation on Friday, was forced to wrap up his investigation into the president-elect after Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris in November’s race for the White House.

But he left behind a detailed 174-page report into his findings that concluded Trump would have been convicted, given the weight of the evidence against him, had he not been saved from jail by the American electorate.

“When it became clear that Mr Trump had lost the election and that lawful means of challenging the election results had failed, he resorted to a series of criminal efforts to retain power,” Smith wrote, going on to outline the former president’s pressure campaign against his own deputy Mike Pence, the fraudulent electors plot and many other aspects of his battle to upend the result and cling to power.

None of which seemed to cut it on Fox News’s breakfast show Fox and Friends on Tuesday morning, where Smith’s condemnation of the once and future president for attempting to subvert democracy was breezily dismissed out of hand as “not a big deal” by anchor Brian Kilmeade.

“It’s not news when a prosecutor says he would have got a conviction,” Kilmeade sneered.

“This is nothing more than a prosecution on paper,” agreed his guest Katie Cherkasky, a constitutional law attorney and former federal prosecutor.

“It’s every prosecutor’s dream. You have no rebuttal. You have no cross-examination. You don’t actually have to prove this case. And in fact, nothing in this report is particularly new.”

She continued: “Jack Smith had released the indictment, the superseding indictment. All the same facts are there.

“The American people overwhelmingly voted for President Trump [in November 2024], knowing all of what he claims would have sustained this conviction on these unprecedented charges. So, quite frankly, this is just a partisan effort at lawfare, yet again couched in legal jargon.”

Fox and Friends co-hosts Lawrence Jones and Steve Doocy on air on Tuesday January 14 2025
Fox and Friends co-hosts Lawrence Jones and Steve Doocy on air on Tuesday January 14 2025 (Fox News/YouTube)

Co-host Lawrence Jones in turn quibbled with Smith’s emphasis on Trump telling his supporters to “fight, fight, fight” before they laid siege to the US Capitol on January 6 2021.

“Well, there is obviously no smoking gun evidence here,” Cherkasky claimed.

“And as you pointed out, all of these supposed pieces of evidence are subject to interpretation, which is exactly the point of our adversarial system. Exactly the point of actually confronting the prosecution’s evidence with the rebuttal.

She continued: “The underlying issue with proving this case was always going to be to prove the criminal intent of Donald Trump. And that hasn’t been established by this report. And I don’t think it would have been established in a courtroom with any sort of due process.

“I think this is just a shame that this was released. I think that is just pure lawfare and serves absolutely no purpose but to undermine Americans’ confidence in the justice system.”

Cherkasky made no reference to Trump’s own energetic efforts to undermine faith in the justice system over the last two years, however.

The same program invited George Washington University Law School Professor Jonathan Turley – who defended Trump at his first impeachment in 2019 – on air to make the same argument shortly afterwards.

Turley said Smith’s report betrayed “an absolute disregard for the controlling decisions of the Supreme Court” on presidential immunity and “read more like a defense argument” justifying the special counsel’s actions.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business on Tuesday January 14 2025
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business on Tuesday January 14 2025 (Fox Business)

Over on Fox Business, Maria Bartiromo interviewed veteran former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who, like Kilmeade, claimed “prosecutors always think they’re going to win”, called the report “a one-sided, prosecutor’s version of reality” and bemoaned the lack of an opportunity for Trump to rebut his conclusions – overlooking the president-elect’s late night Truth Social broadside against Smith, which Bartiromo had read aloud seconds earlier.

Gingrich went on to call the report “outrageous” and “frankly sick” and Smith a “destructive anti-constitutional figure” who had carried out “an absolute attack on the constitutional principle that you are innocent until proven guilty”.

“We’ll see if Kash Patel can clean this up,” the equally-indignant host responded, alluding to Trump’s nominee for FBI director.

Former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who became a pariah to her party for serving on the bipartisan House committee that investigated the events of January 6, offered a constrasting response to the report on X.

“The Special Counsel’s 1/6 Report, made public last night, confirms the unavoidable facts of 1/6 yet again,” she wrote.

“DOJ’s exhaustive and independent investigation reached the same essential conclusions as the Select Committee. All this DOJ evidence must be preserved.

Cheney continued: “But most important now, as the Senate considers confirming Trump’s Justice Department nominees: if those nominees cooperated with Trump’s deceit to overturn the 2020 election, they cannot now be entrusted with the responsibility to preserve the rule of law and protect our Republic.

“As our framers knew, our institutions only hold when those in office are not compromised by personal loyalty to a tyrant. So this question is now paramount for Republicans: Will you faithfully perform the duties the framers assigned to you and do what the Constitution requires? Or do you lack the courage?”

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