HEATHER

September 29, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

---

The scene that unfolded today at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a snapshot of politics in the U.S. today. Testifying under oath was Jack Smith, who as special counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice investigated Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and his retention of classified documents after he left office in 2021.

Questioning Smith were the senators, whose speech in Congress is protected. Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution states: “The Senators and Representatives…shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

The courts have interpreted this clause to give lawmakers broad protection for what they say in Congress. Republicans have used this protection to make outrageous accusations and to spread disinformation. That practice was on display in spades today.

Former attorney general Merrick Garland appointed Smith special counsel on November 18, 2022, three days after Trump announced he was running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Garland said that since both Trump and Biden were likely to be presidential candidates, his appointment of Smith was meant to underscore “the Department’s commitment to both independence and accountability in particularly sensitive matters. It also allows prosecutors and agents to continue their work expeditiously, and to make decisions indisputably guided only by the facts and the law.”

Trump was not happy about the appointment, calling Smith “a hit man for Obama.”

In June 2023 a grand jury indicted Trump on 37 “felony violations of our national security laws” and “participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice,” in his retention of classified documents. Charged alongside Trump was his aide Walt Nauta, who is now the director of Oval Office operations. In December, after Trump was reelected, Smith dropped Trump from the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump appointee overseeing the case, has blocked the release of Smith’s report, although it is standard for a special counsel to release a final report.

It is the other case that was the focus of today’s Senate hearing.

On August 1, 2023, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., charged Trump with four felony offenses “arising from his efforts to unlawfully retain power by using fraud and deceit to overturn the 2020 election results,” as Smith’s final report put it. Trump challenged the indictment on the grounds that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed as part of his official duties and that his actions trying to overturn the election were part of his official duties.

On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court largely agreed with Trump, upending the principle that the United States was a nation of laws, not of men. The Trump v. United States decision sent Smith back to the drawing board to take the case, now stripped of anything that could fall under “official duties,” before another grand jury, and that grand jury returned an indictment for the same offenses. But after Trump was reelected, Smith moved on November 25 to dismiss the case because of the long-standing position of the Department of Justice that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

The case can be resumed once Trump is no longer president.

It’s unclear why Senate Republicans thought it was a good idea to remind people of Trump’s attempt to overthrow an election when the midterms are less than forty days away. Some of them, though, clearly intended to appeal either to Trump or to the MAGA base by using their protected speech to insult and abuse Smith.

Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) launched a hit on Smith, setting up the idea he was part of a conspiracy with Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis and her colleague Nathan Wade to persecute Trump.

Schmitt asked Smith: “Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?”

Smith looked confused at the sudden turn in the hearing and asked Schmitt to repeat the question. Once Schmitt did, and asked him if he had ever been to Atlanta during his time as special counsel, Smith answered: “I really don’t think so. It’s possible I flew through the Atlanta airport on the way to Florida, but I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta. I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that.”

“Did you ever meet Nathan Wade or Fani Willis in your time as special counsel,” Schmitt asked.

“No,” Smith answered.

Then Schmitt pounced: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior/Hawks game on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?” A staffer briefly flashed a poster board. Then Schmitt said: “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”

Smith said: “You just took it down really quick. If I could look at that again?”

Schmitt answered: “We’ll put it in a file. You can respond. I think you’ve already perjured yourself.” He went on to call Smith a “villain” and a “dirtbag.”

Smith said: “[I]f this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time…. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think, February of 2024.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) figured it out. Schmitt was accusing Smith of being in Atlanta at an Atlanta Hawks game, where he could hypothetically have met up with Willis and Wade. In reality, he was in Maryland at a game in which Maryland played the University of Iowa: the Hawkeyes.

Klobuchar addressed Schmitt: “Could it then be that University of Iowa’s the Hawkeyes, could that be it, and maybe before we show this kind of thing…that might be the confusion over the names of the team but perhaps you should’ve looked at it more carefully….”

Schmitt exploded, accusing her of “trying to rehabilitate the witness.” And yet, newscasters who reviewed tapes of the games found Smith in the stands at the Maryland game.

“You had the teams wrong, sir,” Klobuchar told Schmitt.

Indeed, although Schmitt’s poster board featured a picture of Fani Willis and another of the Atlanta arena, the messages on it appeared to be between Smith’s deputy special counsel J.P. Cooney and another person, asking, “Is 109 Row 1 reserved for Jack?” Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo notes that the Atlanta State Farm Arena uses letters to denote rows in section 109 rather than numbers. The University of Maryland arena uses numbers.

After the hearing, Schmitt appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show, where host Andrew Kolvet cheered Schmitt’s attack on Smith. “Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game…in Atlanta,” Kolvet said. “It was a great moment. Good for you on that.”

So Schmitt got his right-wing media hit from a completely fabricated storyline. One newscaster noted: “When a witness lies under oath before Congress, he can face prison. When a senator gets it wrong, he says he was just ‘asking questions’.”

Smith, in contrast, stood firmly on facts and the rule of law. “I have been fortunate to serve a country that I love for nearly 30 years in local, national, and international settings,” he said in his opening statement. “My service has spanned both Republican and Democratic administrations. I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalties. My career has been dedicated to serving our country by upholding the rule of law and the core principles on which our country was founded.

“I believe that there is no role for politics in the proper administration of justice. A prosecutor’s decisions must be based on the facts and the law. The status, power, prominence, or political affiliation of the subject of an investigation must play no role in decisions to investigate, prosecute, or decline prosecution.”

As special counsel, Smith said, he and his office “took actions based on the facts and the law.” “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” he said. “If asked whether to prosecute a former President based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that President was a Republican or a Democrat.”

“The charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence,” he said. “Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions…. Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power….

“And…President Trump stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club after he left office in January 2021 and he repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents. Highly sensitive information was held in non-secure locations, including a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place.”

Smith promised to answer the senators’ questions truthfully. “I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the President or others.”

“As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal investigation because they are perceived to have opposed the President. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s long-standing core values, traditions, and norms. History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It is often weakened by attacks on the institutions and public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the career prosecutors, FBI agents, and support staff who served on my team, simply because of their unwavering commitment to the fair and impartial administration of justice without regard for any personal costs.

“I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States.

“I remain confident, however, that the rule of law will endure because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.”

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

This 3D Printer Is 15 Times Faster, and the Army Is Already Buying It

If 3D printing is going to hit speed that manufacturing requires, the improvement will need to be exponential.

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Sep 29, 2026

 

I think we’ve all concluded that the bloom is somewhat off the rose in terms of 3D printing. Like so many extraordinary advances in science and technology that appear akin to magic for a while, watching a machine that looked vaguely like your microwave turn spools of plastic into physical representations of everyday objects you’d just drawn on your computer was a pretty amazing experience. You could print precision parts, you could print pizzas, and eventually you could print entire buildings. And while Yoda from Star Wars was for years the most frequently printed object, there were plenty of serious and important applications in pharmaceuticals, construction and surgery, to name a few.

There was, however, an unspoken issue that too many of the earliest enthusiasts overlooked, whether intentionally or inadvertently—or because so much of the formative experimentation and developmental work took place in academic environments where time and money were secondary concerns. In any event, for whatever reason, 3D printing hit a fairly substantial barrier in the area of manufacturing, where you might have expected that it would absolutely and rapidly thrive.

The problem was that it just took too darn long to get the job done. Or, as the comedian Stephen Wright used to say: everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. In the hurry-up world that we live in today, where nobody wants to wait for anything, this was a serious impediment and somewhat comparable to one of the biggest obstacles that we’re seeing with the adoption of EVs. While it may only take an hour using a high-speed hook-up to charge your Tesla, you’re still going to waste several hours if you have to wait in line behind a few other people waiting to do the same thing. If it takes 20 minutes to fabricate a single part that a machine could stamp out hundreds of in the same period of time, you’re never going to win the race to replace the old fabrication methods.

Manufacturing assembly lines work on the weakest link theory: that the slowest action or process in the production chain is what dictates the speed of the entire operation. If 3D printing is ever going to graduate to the level of speed that volume manufacturing requires, the improvement in the amount of time required to produce a single part will need to be exponential, not incremental. The span is similar to the best runner in the world, competing in a sprint against an F1 race car. We’re talking about the difference between a system capable of printing a part every 10 seconds as compared to the current production rate that could be hours per part.

I may have seen the future recently at a company called Impossible Objects, which has built next-generation printing systems for manufacturers that it says operate 15 times faster than the current competition and turn out parts that are stronger, lighter, and more precisely honed. Their current machines (backed by dozens of issued patents) already set the bar extraordinarily high, but they expect that the next quantum jump in production speed will be on the order of 65 times. Speaking to the leaders of this team, you get the distinct impression of two ideas that they hold near and dear: (1) if you don’t know it’s impossible, it’s easier to do; and (2) it always seems impossible until it’s done.

Keep in mind that these are not toys or lightweight demos, these are industrial production-grade materials as strong as aluminum (on a strength-to-weight basis), which can be produced at traditional manufacturing-like costs. In addition, because many of the new products they are producing (specifically for military applications) require complex geometries, they simply cannot be executed and accomplished with prior injection molding tech. In order to even imagine these new solutions, there had to be a heavy dose of dreams and wish casting. But they got there and have demonstrated something that every good entrepreneur knows: the only thing that ultimately keeps a dream from being achieved is the fear of failure.

Whether you believe the objective warfare observers along with certain of our own independent government agencies or the latest lies of the drunk running the Pentagon, the fact is that, for our military to remain effective and competitive, they will need to take huge steps forward in every aspect of drone warfare and especially in terms of developing and manufacturing hyper-lightweight disposable devices designed for one-way munition delivery. The hardest challenge for changemakers and innovators is always to get the folks in charge to give up the ways that have worked fairly well for them in the past, but fortunately here, there’s very little in the past to discard.

The latest Impossible Objects machine, which the U.S. Army has already purchased, will produce 10,000 drones per month with a near term production target of 120,000 UAV bodies per year. In addition to the machines themselves, the company supplies its customers with substantial volumes of proprietary consumables which its machines turn into these devices. The annual value of the consumables is about five times the cost of the machines themselves and these materials are not available anywhere else for a variety of reasons.

At first, dreams seem impossible; then improbable; and then inevitable.

SWALLOWING TRUMP'S FILTHY LIES

 

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS HIS LATEST INC. MAGAZINE ARTICLE

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

CONGRATS TO JYL BONAGURO ON A GREAT SHOWING IN AN IMPORTANT EXHIBITION AT THE NATIONAL HELLENIC MUSEUM

 

RAPISTS AND GRIFTERS - THIEVES AND TRAITORS

 

A FOOLISH CLOWN

 

When historians look back on Trump’s foreign policy in a century, I bet these are their verdict on his most famous policies:

The support of Russia--the most evil.

The pillaging of Venezuela--the most corrupt.

The decision to go to war with Iran--the most incompetent.

The abandonment of Taiwan--the most geopolitically catastrophic.

The China policy--the most craven.

The destruction of US relations with its allies--the most stupid.

NO CLUE...

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Xfinity Is Turning WiFi Into Home Security. ADT and Brinks Should Pay Attention

Disruptive innovation and competition can come from anyone and anywhere.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Sep 22, 2026

Every time I pay a bill for my home security service, I find myself wondering exactly what the value is that I’m allegedly receiving. It’s been a few decades and there hasn’t been a single instance of activity—our pets don’t even trigger any alarms. I’m pretty sure we’re among the millions of families who’ve gone for months if not longer without ever even turning the systems on. We do replace the batteries in our smoke alarms on a regular basis, but they don’t really depend on paying Brinks or ADT in order to operate.

If my insurance company didn’t offer me some modest home insurance discount for having the service, I’m pretty sure we would have bagged the whole thing by now. I guess we’d keep the signs and window stickers, as those are probably the major deterrents in the whole deal. I’m sure there are folks who can recite hair-raising and instructive instances of the benefit of these services, but it’s certainly not me. It feels a little like buying flood insurance when you live in the middle of the desert, although with climate change these days, I guess even those folks can’t be sure of what’s coming down the pipe. They can be certain, however, that if they suffer a loss, their gigantic deductible will make sure that they feel some significant portion of the pain.

All of which brings me to a new offer by Xfinity that seems to raise a serious competitive threat to the firms protecting us against home invasions, break-ins and burglaries. It’s called Xfinity Shield, which is described as an “always-on” home protection and security platform. I want to give them immediate props for recognizing that we lazy civilians can’t really be trusted to turn our own systems on and off on a daily basis. Their new basic program is free and relies on your existing WiFi and certain other equipment in order to work. Don’t get me started on how often my WiFi and cable connections go down, but it happens more often than you’d expect.

In any event, while I often talk about the many benefits of riding someone else’s rails, which means to partner or rev share so you can utilize their existing channels and infrastructure in order to avoid the costs of building your own, it’s even smarter and cheaper to double down and add, extend or bolster your existing offerings and infrastructure to create new products and services that you can provide to your existing customer base. But the Shield service is a great example of another important competitive strategy which is moving into adjacent markets where there are substantial opportunities. Frankly, I would guess that the major security firms—even with the advent of Ring doorbells and similar offerings—wouldn’t ever have imagined that entities like Xfinity would move directly into their space.

The WiFi Shield service provides in-house movement alerts and nighttime monitoring without incremental hardware. The claim (which I’m not vouching for) is that enhancements to their WiFi services will detect changes in the radio frequency signals that are being constantly passed between their Gateway head device and WiFi-connected devices in the home and then send a signal to you through their phone app when there are unfamiliar or unexpected changes. As long as you sleep with your phone nearby, I guess this works if the notifications are audible, although the one thing I don’t love about my current system is the absolutely deafening sirens that go off inside and outside the house, which aren’t part of the basic Xfinity deal. Needless to say, for additional fees, there’s a full menu of additional equipment, cameras, services, and upcharges which will let you build a system that more closely resembles the typical home platforms and packages.

The simple morale of this whole story is that disruptive innovation and competition can come from anyone and anywhere including the players we regard as laggards and last generation performers who are stuck in the hardware business while software rules the world. But the Xfinity Shield is a very important example of how new technology and advanced software and signaling can take existing rails and connections and re-energize and update them to support and offer new competitive services at price points (including free) that will give the big guys in security like Brinks and ADT plenty of headaches beyond wondering about Ring and its doorbells.