Jack Smith’s final report on Donald Trump came out Tuesday, and Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill had very different takeaways from the former special counsel’s report.
But lawmakers from both parties were able to agree on one thing: they’re angry — just for different reasons.
For Republicans, the report represents the latest miscarriage of justice against Trump. It’s a parting shot at the GOP standard-bearer just five days before he’s about to be inaugurated.
Rep. Aaron Bean said his fellow Republican lawmakers found the prosecution of the former president “a sad chapter” for the country — not because of the litany of crimes the Justice Department claimed Trump committed, but because prosecutors dared to bring a case at all.
“You never heard the word lawfare until Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and everybody took over the DOJ to weaponize it,” Bean told NOTUS. “It’s sad. I’m looking forward to getting that chapter off the books and move on and move forward.”
But for Democrats, the report represents the latest miscarriage of justice for Trump, who has evaded prosecution by delaying trials and, finally, by being elected president.
“This is exactly what we’ve been trying to prevent,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told NOTUS. “The crumbling of our democracy doesn’t happen overnight; it happens by the slow dismantling of critical protections and norms of our democracy, mainly equal treatment under the law.”
“When we kind of pave this precedent that you can do anything as long as you can win an election, you can basically experience impunity,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “It’s just a very dangerous path to go down.”
Smith said in no uncertain terms this week that he would have secured a conviction against the man about to become president in five days were it not for the will of the voters. And some Republicans, surprisingly, were willing to accept that conclusion.
“You gotta believe there’s some truth on that,” Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump over his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, told NOTUS.
But Republicans dismissed the broader conclusion — that there was “substantial evidence” Trump committed crimes to subvert the will of the voters to cling to the presidency despite his loss. Many GOP lawmakers told NOTUS this week they hadn’t bothered to read the report, but they knew enough to disagree with the findings anyway.
Of course, those conclusions were of little comfort to Democrats. For nearly a decade, Democrats have worked to showcase Trump and his actions as a unique threat to democracy, only to be rejected by a plurality of Americans at the ballot box last year.
Federal prosecutors believed Trump’s behavior constituted an insurrection, Smith said in the report. But prosecutors ultimately did not charge him as such because of the risk of meeting the legal requirements for this little-used statute.
“Substantial evidence demonstrates that Mr. Trump then engaged in an unprecedented criminal effort to overturn the legitimate results of the election in order to retain power,” Smith wrote in the report.
Republicans said they couldn’t care less about that evidence.
“I don’t care what Jack Smith says,” Rep. Eli Crane, who said he hadn’t read the report, told NOTUS. “I think he’s a complete liar. He’s totally corrupt. So I couldn’t care less what Jack Smith says.”
Rep. Glenn Grothman, who also told NOTUS he hadn’t read the report, said he wasn’t ashamed at all of the former president’s actions in the lead-up to Jan. 6. “Nobody ever thinks about it,” he said.
“I would say no Republican — I’m talking about the average person — thinks that report has any credibility or that he has any merit,” Grothman added. “And that is one of the reasons why Donald Trump got elected.”
Rep. Nancy Mace went so far as to suggest it was Smith himself who should face charges over his prosecution of the former president.
“The guy probably broke an untold number of laws,” Mace said. “This is lawfare, going after Trump in the way that he did as Joe Biden’s henchman.”
For Democrats on Capitol Hill, the report was a final ripple of November’s election results, as Trump’s victory assured the prosecution would likely never pin him down. All Democrats interviewed for this story agreed it was disappointing.
“It is unfortunate,” Rep. Shri Thanedar told NOTUS. “We have had ethical violations, legal violations by administrations in the past — the classic case of Richard Nixon — but I think Trump takes it a step too far.”
“People have low trust in government and we need to restore the people’s trust,” Thanedar said. “I don’t know if we’re necessarily going in the right direction.”
Some Democrats laid the failure to bring the case to trial at the feet of the attorney general.
“It’s unfortunate,” Rep. Ami Bera said. “I think there’s justifiable criticism of how slow Merrick Garland was to look into these allegations, charges and so forth, but there’s also, you know, he is the incoming president of the United States, so, you know, what does that look like? How do you not disrupt the peaceful transition of power?”
Other Democrats found it hard to process that voters swept Trump back into power after prosecutors had laid out such extensive evidence that he had abused his post.
“Most of us felt like, given all the evidence in the last eight years, that the American voters wouldn’t choose to do what they did,” Rep. Mark DeSaulnier said. “These are the institutions we have. I think, like a lot of us, I’m troubled that that’s what the voters decided to do about it. Here we are.”
Even lawmakers who had found themselves on the House floor on Jan. 6 or otherwise entangled in the near endless string of failed efforts to hold Trump to task said they weren’t watching as the last vehicles of accountability for the former president sputtered out.
“I don’t pay much attention to it,” Rep. Tim Burchett told NOTUS. “I was the last person to leave the floor on January 6th, last House member, and the committee never would call me.”
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Mark Alfred and Helen Huiskes are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.