Pam Bondi moves to bury Jack Smith's final verdict on Trump's classified docs case forever

 

Pam Bondi moves to bury Jack Smith's final verdict on Trump's classified docs case forever: 'It belongs in the dustbin of history'

Pam Bondi decides Jack Smith’s conclusions are too explosive for daylight.

UnPresidented

Jan 24, 2026

The Justice Department is telling a federal judge that the public should never see what former special counsel Jack Smith wrote about Donald Trump’s classified documents case, and it’s saying so in language that leaves very little room for ambiguity.

In a new court filing, the DOJ says Attorney General Pam Bondi has decided that Smith’s final report is strictly an internal document meant only for government officials, not the public. According to the department, the report is “privileged and confidential” and should “not be released outside the Department of Justice.”

This filing was submitted after Judge Aileen Cannon signaled that her earlier order blocking the report’s release would expire next month. The DOJ’s response warns that even if the court’s restriction lapses, the department does not believe the report should ever see daylight.

Trump’s DOJ didn’t just argue for secrecy. It attacked the legitimacy of the report itself.

The filing describes Smith’s investigation as “unlawful from its inception,” echoing Cannon’s earlier decision to throw out the case against Trump. That ruling claimed that Smith was improperly appointed and lacked the authority to wield the powers of a U.S. attorney. Bondi now says that flaw taints everything Smith produced while on the job.

During Jack Smith’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this week, Trump fired off a Truth Social post where he called for Smith to be arrested and prosecuted.

“Put simply,” the department writes, “Smith’s tenure was marked by illegality and impropriety,” adding that under “no circumstance” should his work be treated as an official or credible DOJ product.

DOJ also acknowledged something else that’s striking: current leadership hasn’t actually reviewed Smith’s report in detail. The department admits it only has “secondhand information” about how Smith handled sensitive material and says it can’t guarantee that confidential grand jury information was properly removed.

Rather than review the document line by line, DOJ told the court it doesn’t believe such a review is even necessary.

In plain terms, the Trump administration is saying: we don’t trust this report, we’re not going to thoroughly audit it, and we don’t think anyone else should read it either.

The filing also argues that releasing the report would unfairly harm Trump and his former aides, warning that it could expose private communications between Trump and his lawyers. The DOJ says that outcome would be unjustified and prejudicial, especially now that the case itself has been dismissed.

Then the department drops any remaining pretense of neutrality.

Smith’s report, DOJ declares, is the “illicit product of an unlawful investigation and prosecution” and “belongs in the dustbin of history.” The final line is blunt and unmistakable: “The United States will leave it there.”

In sum, Trump’s DOJ is formally washing its hands of a special counsel investigation that once represented the government’s most serious effort to hold Trump accountable for mishandling classified information.

Smith was appointed to provide transparency and public trust. Now, according to the department that empowered him, the public was never supposed to see what he found.

Now it remains to be seen of Trump and Bondi get their way.

The Coming Trump Crackup

 

The Coming Trump Crackup

Jan. 23, 2026

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

Last week Minneapolis’s police chief, Brian O’Hara, said the thing he fears most is the “moment where it all explodes.” I share his worry. If you follow the trajectory of events, it’s pretty clear that we’re headed toward some kind of crackup.

We are in the middle of at least four unravelings: The unraveling of the postwar international order. The unraveling of domestic tranquility wherever Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents bring down their jackboots. The further unraveling of the democratic order, with attacks on Fed independence and — excuse the pun — trumped-up prosecutions of political opponents. Finally, the unraveling of President Trump’s mind.

Of these four, the unraveling of Trump’s mind is the primary one, leading to all the others. Narcissists sometimes get worse with age, as their remaining inhibitions fall away. The effect is bound to be profound when the narcissist happens to be president of the United States.

Every president I’ve ever covered gets more full of himself the longer he remains in office, and when you start out with Trump-level self-regard, the effect is grandiosity, entitlement, lack of empathy and ferocious overreaction to perceived slights.

Furthermore, over the past year, Trump has been quicker and quicker to resort to violence. In 2025 the U.S. carried out or contributed to 622 overseas bombing missions, killing people in places ranging from Venezuela to Iran, Nigeria and Somalia — not to mention Minneapolis.

The arc of tyranny bends toward degradation. Tyrants generally get drunk on their own power, which progressively reduces restraint, increases entitlement and self-focus and amps up risk taking and overconfidence while escalating social isolation, corruption and defensive paranoia.

I have found it useful these days to go back to the historians of ancient Rome, starting with the originals like Sallust and Tacitus. Those fellows had a front-row look at tyranny, with case studies strewed before them — Nero, Caligula, Commodus, Domitian, Tiberius. They understood the intimate connection between private morals and public order and that when there is a decay of the former, there will be a collapse of the latter.

“Of all our passions and appetites, the love of power is of the most imperious and unsociable nature, since the pride of one man requires the submission of the multitude,” Edward Gibbon wrote in his 1776 classic, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” He continued: “In the tumult of civil discord, the laws of society lose their force, and their place is seldom supplied by those of humanity. The ardor of contention, the pride of victory, the despair of success, the memory of past injuries and the fear of future dangers all contribute to inflame the mind and to silence the voice of pity. From such motives almost every page of history has been stained with civil blood.”

The 18th-century English historian Edward Wortley Montagu distinguished between ambition and the lust for domination. Ambition can be a laudable trait, since it can drive people to serve the community in order to win public admiration. The lust for domination, he wrote, is a different passion, a form of selfishness that causes us to “draw every thing to center in ourselves, which we think will enable us to gratify every other passion.”

The insatiable lust for domination, he continues, “banishes all the social virtues.” The selfish tyrant attaches himself to only those others who share his selfishness, who are eager to wear the mask of perpetual lying. “His friendship and his enmity will be alike unreal, and easily convertible, if the change will serve his interest.”

Those historians were impressed by how much personal force the old tyrants could generate. The man lusting for power is always active, the center of the show, relentless, vigilant, distrustful, restless when anything stands in his way.

Tacitus was especially good at describing the effect the tyrant has on the people around him. When the tyrant first takes power, there is a “rush into servitude” as great swarms of sycophants suck up to the great man. The flattery must forever escalate and grow more fawning, until every follower’s dignity is shorn away. Then comes what you might call the disappearance of the good, as morally healthy people lie low in order to survive. Meanwhile, the whole society tends to be anesthetized. The relentless flow of appalling events eventually overloads the nervous system; the rising tide of brutality, which once seemed shocking, comes to seem unremarkable.

As the disease of tyranny progresses, citizens may eventually lose the habits of democracy — the art of persuasion and compromise, interpersonal trust, an intolerance for corruption, the spirit of freedom, the ethic of moderation. “It is easier to crush men’s spirits and their enthusiasm than to revive them,” Tacitus wrote. “Indeed, there comes over us an attachment to the very enforced inactivity, and the idleness hated at first is finally loved.”

I don’t have enough imagination to know where the next crackup will come — through perhaps some domestic, criminal or foreign crisis? Though I was struck by a sentence Robert Kagan wrote in an essay on the effects of Trump’s foreign policy in The Atlantic: “Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post-Cold War world like paradise.”

And no, I don’t think America is headed toward anything like a Rome-style collapse. Our institutions are too strong, and our people, deep down, still have the same democratic values.

But I do know that events are being propelled by one man’s damaged psyche. History does not record many cases in which a power-mad leader careening toward tyranny suddenly regained his senses and became more moderate. On the contrary, the normal course of the disease is toward ever-accelerating deterioration and debauchery.

And I do understand why America’s founding fathers spent so much time reading historians like Tacitus and Sallust. Thomas Jefferson called Tacitus “the first writer in the world, without a single exception.” They understood that the lust for power is a primal human impulse and that even all the safeguards they built into the Constitution are no match for this lust when it is not restrained ethically from within.

As John Adams put it in a letter in 1798, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”

An Unhinged President on the Magic Mountain

 

An Unhinged President on the Magic Mountain

Jan. 21, 2026

 

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Davos, Switzerland

Decades before this Swiss village became famous as a pilgrimage site for global elites attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, it was best known as a destination for well-to-do invalids seeking respiratory relief in the crisp Alpine air. It was that reputation that brought Thomas Mann to Davos (where his wife was convalescing) for a three-week visit in 1912, inspiring his great novel, “The Magic Mountain,” published 12 years later.

The book is set in the years before World War I, and one of its aims is to address the moral and psychological unraveling of European civilization on the eve of its catastrophe. At its heart lies a long argument between two fiercely held and fatally flawed worldviews. The first is represented by the character of Lodovico Settembrini, an earnest but naïve pacifist and internationalist. The second comes from Leo Naphta, a proto-totalitarian figure who thinks that the ideals of freedom are an illusion and that humanity’s “deepest desire is to obey.”

Both men are dying of tuberculosis. In the book’s climactic scene, they face off in a duel in which Settembrini fires his gun in the air and Naphta shoots himself — emblematic of the soft liberalism that lacks the nerve to defend its values, and the despotic will to power that ultimately destroys itself.

That could almost be Davos this week. Officially, the theme of this year’s meeting is “A Spirit of Dialogue” — emollient pablum to suit a modern-day Settembrini. Unofficially, we have entered the territory of Naphta — of open menace and nervous apprehension and calculations of available power. The underlying spirit of Davos this year is fear.

That spirit arrived with Donald Trump, whose hourlong speech to a packed audience on Wednesday sounded, in places, as if it had been ghostwritten by Mario Puzo. Wrapped in self-aggrandizing boasts and exaggerations, along with ugly jibes, meandering asides and shopworn grievances, lay a premeditated threat worthy of a padrino: “You can say ‘yes’ and we will be very appreciative,” the president said, in reference to his demand for Greenland. “Or you can say ‘no’ and we will remember.”

The line didn’t get the attention it deserved in news headlines that focused on Trump’s promise not to use force to take the semiautonomous Danish territory (which also sent stocks soaring after the previous day’s sell-off). But the idea of Trump sending troops to seize Nuuk was never very plausible in the first place: The president is not a boots-on-the-ground guy.

More worrisome was the implied threat to NATO itself. Trump cast the cession of Greenland as a sort of token of appreciation from Europe, “a very small ask compared to what we have given them for many decades.” And, while he didn’t make it explicit, the “we will remember” line suggested a willingness to harm Europe in ways that could really hurt, perhaps by cutting off arms to Ukraine or withdrawing many if not all of the roughly 80,000 U.S. troops still stationed on the continent.

Whether Denmark folds or the administration makes good on Trump’s threats or the two sides find some sort of off-ramp remains to be seen. It was a hopeful sign to see the president back away from this latest tariff threats against eight European countries, though with this president the respites tend to be temporary. The “framework of a future deal” that Trump claims to have reached over the territory with Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, remains unspecified.

But it was also telling to attend a panel meeting on European defense that included Rutte along with the presidents of Poland and Finland and hardly hear the word “Ukraine” mentioned until the session was all but over. It was left to the NATO leader to exclaim, almost plaintively: “The main issue is not Greenland. Now the main issue is Ukraine.”

Except that’s not exactly right. Where Europe had once faced a single menace, it now faces a double one — a Scylla of unyielding Russian brutality and a Charybdis of American abandonment and territorial avarice.

That can only help Vladimir Putin, since a crackup of the Atlantic alliance has been a core goal of Russian foreign policy since the 1940s — infinitely more valuable than whatever advantages Moscow may hope to find in the Arctic. It can also only help China, because a Europe that feels abandoned by the United States will almost inevitably lean more heavily on Beijing as an alternative economic partner. Not surprisingly, the Chinese vice premier He Lifeng was in Davos, offering “win-win cooperation.”

A day before Trump’s speech, the forum heard forceful speeches from Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister; Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission; and Emmanuel Macron, the president of France. They each stressed an irreparable break with the past — “nostalgia will not bring back the old order,” said von der Leyen — and a need to find their way in a world of fading niceties and harder realities: “We are no longer relying on just the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength,” said Carney.

The words are eloquent and the resolve is admirable. If there’s a silver lining for the rest of NATO to having Trump back in the White House, it’s that he has underlined the legitimacy of longstanding American complaints that those nations spend too little on their militaries and that they have forgone economic dynamism for the sake of social equity and environmental considerations. Now they are being forced to recognize these truths as never before, including through meaningful increases in defense spending and a reconsideration of their costly green-energy ambitions, which have slowed growth and spurred populist backlashes.

But nearly every centrist leader in the West faces the dilemma of electorates that either don’t want to move at all or want to move much too sharply. Pandering to either would result in immobility for the sake of maintaining existing social protections or radicalism for the sake of overturning the liberal political order. And Europe’s broader political outlook, which for three generations has inculcated a culture of cooperation and pacifism of the sort Settembrini would have admired, is ill suited for an era of confrontation and war.

France has had four prime ministers in the last two years as its parliament struggled to pass a budget. Germany’s unwieldy left-right coalition government has failed to lift the economy, which last year grew at an anemic 0.2 percent rate. In Britain, Keir Starmer, the country’s latest hapless prime minister, has an unfavorability rating of 75 percent. And in each country, far-right parties are at or near the top of the polls, checked only by the resolve of mainstream parties to keep them out of government. Should that resolve fade, as it probably will, Europe will not be anyone’s bulwark against the illiberal tide sweeping the world at large.

All this recalls the diseased Europe that Mann sought to capture in “The Magic Mountain” — the one in which old conventions and pieties were evaporating under the heat of new ideas and new technologies, unfulfilled longings and uncontrollable rages. The cultural historian Philipp Blom called the era “the Vertigo Years” and noted the similarities to the present: “Then as now, the feeling of living in an accelerating world, of speeding into the unknown, was overwhelming.” What it wound up speeding into was, of course, a colossal civilizational tragedy.

Critics of the forum meetings like to point out that what happens up here is very far from ordinary life; that an annual confab of the very rich, powerful and influential (and the journalists dispatched to write about them) isn’t representative; that nothing good that happens in Davos is real and that nothing real that happens here is good.

But the Davos that Mann wrote about was not just a microcosm of civilization as it was but also a portent of what it was becoming.

It feels very much the same today.