Given what’s going on in Minnesota – another day, another ICE execution – it’s understandable few have noticed the latest authoritarian move to suppress vital information and deny us the right to judge it for ourselves.
I want to revisit a chain of events that occurred from 2021 to 2023, so please indulge me. I promise to connect the dots to our dire present day.
You may remember when Trump transitioned in 2021 to the status of private citizen, he stole hundreds of classified documents and spirited them to Mar-a-Lago. After umpteen federal demands that he return what he stole, he was indicted in 2023 by a federal grand jury on 38 counts of violating the Espionage Act, obstructing justice, and crafting a coverup. According to the indictment, the purloined material exposed “defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to nuclear attack,” thereby putting “at risk the national security of the United States.”
Federal sleuth Jack Smith and his team wrote a comprehensive final report believed to go far beyond the stark details in the indictment. But the MAGA regime refuses to release it.
And early last week, a Trump lawyer asked the courts to bury the report forever. His despotic client wants to block the Justice Department, “as well as its current, former, and future officers, agents, officials, and employees,” from sharing the findings with those of us who wish to read them.
Trump’s goal is to erase this sordid episode from history’s ledger for all time, regardless of whether this country regains its senses down the road.
I can see why. Thefts and coverups don’t play well with sane observers. Back when the classified doc case dominated the news, he was savaged in the polls abd assailed even by some conservatives. In 2022, Karl Rove went on Fox News and said: “None of these government documents are his to be taken. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978 you cannot take original documents out of the White House when you leave…It’s verboten under the law.” A year later Trump falsely claimed, “I have every right to have those boxes” – but conservative talk show host Erick Erickson said otherwise: “Game over, legally. What an idiot.”
But wait, I was talking about Jack Smith. Last Thursday, the ex-special counsel testified in a public House hearing – but only about the Trump indictment that covered the events of Jan. 6. He was barred from mentioning the classified documents case because his report is under seal down in Florida (or, in everyday parlance, suppressed) by MAGA Judge Aileen Cannon. Her longstanding order to squelch the report is set to expire on Feb. 24, hence Trump’s newly filed quest for a permanent ban. In his lawyer’s words, lifting the ban and allowing us to read the report would “irreparably harm President Trump.” (There’s a legal doctrine known as consciousness of guilt. His lawyer’s words suggest it.)
My broader point is the MAGA regime is not merely murdering truth via a tsunami of lies; it’s also doing so via omission. Burying the report on Trump’s theft of classified docs, an unprecedented act by an ex-president, is a classic (albeit overlooked) example of state-sanctioned silence. Erasure of history – deciding what it deems we are not fit to know – is a common authoritarian crime.
That’s the play in Minnesota, where the regime isn’t likely to write a factual report on the execution of Renee Good. That’s what happening with the Epstein files, only a fraction of which has been released despite a law-ordered Dec. 19 deadline. That’s the deal in Philadelphia, where Trump’s national park workers were ordered to remove the slavery exhibit at The President’s House, because apparently we can’t be trusted to judge George Washington’s flaws as a man in tandem with his greatness as a statesman.
The good news is millions of us do not wish to be deaf, dumb, and blind.
We’ve already seen the videos of Good’s final moments. We’ve already seen the videos of Alex Pretti’s execution, and kudos to the eyewitnesses who’ve surfaced to stop the MAGA feds from suppressing the truth. And we’ve already seen the photos of illegally stolen documents piled next to a toilet at Mar-a-Lago. And we’ve already seen Trump’s sexually suggestive birthday card to his pedophile pal. And we already know that slavery is a dark facet of the American saga; the protest signage at the Philadelphia site is proof that racist erasures won’t render us retroactively ignorant.
And we can draw strength from sages who have weathered oppression. One warning, from the late Soviet and Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, seems especially apt:
“When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.”
Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]