Rachel Maddow

There's no shame in that.

Whether or not you were able to catch some or all of it live, though, we wanted to do this primetime recap basically as our public service to you.

So whether or not you were able to watch any of it, you will not have missed a thing.

All right, today's hearing started with Jack Smith making clear the stakes of the crimes that he investigated, the stakes of that investigation being shut down, and the stakes of the punishment that Trump and his Republican loyalists have since pursued against Jack Smith and against everyone in law enforcement who has tried to hold the line against Trump's crimes.

Our willingness to pay those costs, especially when that service is difficult and comes with costs.

That was as much a theme today as any other, both in terms of the conduct of Jack Smith's investigation and the repercussions since.

since all of it has been very much dominated by the willingness, the eagerness of this president and his supporters to do harm, to even do violence to anyone who opposes Donald Trump or tries to stop him from committing what Jack Smith clearly, again and again and again today, described as crimes.

You know, it was the Republicans who agreed to this hearing.

They agreed that this should be in public and on television.

And, you know, it's possible they're only watching right-wing pro-Trump news, and so they haven't heard much about what Jack Smith actually did in his investigation.

They may not know much about who he actually is and how he speaks.

I don't know why Republicans agreed to do this today, but I'm guessing they did not expect that Jack Smith would just spell it out like this so clearly.

Spell it out.

the evidence he found and the conclusions that he drew about the president's criminal behavior.

Our evidence said he did.

We intended to prove it at trial.

There was plenty of explanation today about how they would have proved it at trial, including an unexpected invocation of Martians, thanks to a remark from Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, quoted here.

He intended to stay in power even though he knew that the claims he was making were false.

And he was willing to obstruct justice and intimidate witnesses to do it, which special counsel Jack Smith was able to explain even to this somewhat bewildered Virginia Republican congressman, a man named Ben Klein.

That is not permitted in any court of law in the United States, which puts a very fine point on the fact of how lucky it is for Donald Trump that these cases never made it into a court of law for a trial.