Uncommon Criminal: The Perp Walk President Protected from Prison

Jeff Robbins
Mon, 26 Jan 2026 23:00:00 -0800
Opinion

It wasn't enough last week for Americans to stomach the global humiliation of watching an untethered president babbling about "taking" territory from a NATO ally, or listening to his hourly cascade of lies about everything, from the sacrifices the allies he dissed had made on our behalf or the latest execution of an American citizen by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

No, there was more. Former Special Counsel Jack Smith, whom President Donald Trump has called a "criminal," "mentally deranged," and an "animal," calmly and professionally testified before Congress about the voluminous evidence that led two separate federal grand juries to indict Trump for a series of crimes which, but for his excellent good fortune, might well have landed him in prison.

A recap is in order.
Updated: Tue Jan 27, 2026

It wasn't enough last week for Americans to stomach the global humiliation of watching an untethered president babbling about "taking" territory from a NATO ally, or listening to his hourly cascade of lies about everything, from the sacrifices the allies he dissed had made on our behalf or the latest execution of an American citizen by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

No, there was more. Former Special Counsel Jack Smith, whom President Donald Trump has called a "criminal," "mentally deranged," and an "animal," calmly and professionally testified before Congress about the voluminous evidence that led two separate federal grand juries to indict Trump for a series of crimes which, but for his excellent good fortune, might well have landed him in prison.

A recap is in order.

Trump was, of course, convicted of 34 counts of fraud in connection with his payments of hush money to a porn star to keep her silent about their "relationship." He is, in sum, an adjudicated crook, 34 times over.

But that's just for starters.

A federal grand jury in Washington indicted him for his attempt to steal the 2020 election, charging him with conspiring to defraud the United States and to obstruct official proceedings, as well as with violating Americans' civil rights. "Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 election," Smith testified, "President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power."

But that wasn't all.

A separate federal grand jury, this one in Florida, charged him with roughly 40 counts of violating the Espionage Act, conspiring to obstruct justice and making false statements in connection with his pilfering of highly classified documents and his deceit of the government regarding the same. "After leaving office in January, 2021," Smith summarized, "President Trump illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago social club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of these documents," noting that these contained "highly sensitive national security information."

No objective person has questioned the extent of the evidence supporting these indictments, and no serious person could. It was voluminous. With understatement borne of thirty years as a prosecutor working for Republican and Democratic administrations alike, Smith put it this way: "Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity. [He] was charged because the evidence established that he willfully broke the laws, the very laws that he swore to uphold."

For all of his infantile self-pity, Donald Trump is a fortunate man. A Supreme Court dominated by Justices he had appointed froze the indictment of him for attempting to undermine the 2020 election for many months, before ruling that, regardless of his criminal motivations, Trump was absolutely or presumptively immune from prosecution for virtually any crime he committed while in office. This derailed that indictment.

The indictment of Trump for stealing classified information and obstructing the investigation into the theft was broomed by a federal judge whom Trump had appointed to the bench, who spared no degree of judicial inventiveness in impeding the prosecution. She then threw the case out at the request of Trump's legal team, which argued that Smith had been illegally appointed — a ruling that seemed destined for reversal if it ever got that far.

It didn't.

Trump's baseless but effective claims that former President Joe Biden had ordered up his prosecution helped him win the 2024 election, and that meant that he skated. Longstanding Justice Department policy prohibits the indictment of a sitting president. And in any event, who was going to prosecute Donald Trump with Donald Trump as president? Attorney General Pam Bondi?

On Tuesday, red-faced Republicans took turns denouncing Smith, who sat impassively while they purported to ask him questions that they prevented him from answering.

Small wonder. As he managed to point out, his team's challenge was having too much evidence inculpating Trump, not too little — and much of it came from Trump's own staff, campaign workers and supporters. In short, Trump ought to count his blessings: there were suitcases full of receipts documenting his criminal guilt.

Trump has skirted prison. He won't skirt a severe verdict by historians. And for our part, we won't skirt the lasting stain that he has left on the country, and on us for electing him.