Jack Smith, the former special counsel who led federal probes into President Donald Trump, heads to Capitol Hill today for a public showdown with the House Judiciary Committee. Republicans, led by Chairman Jim Jordan, plan to press him on what they see as overreaches in his investigations, including attempts to influence the 2024 election through aggressive legal tactics.
The hearing, set for 10 a.m. ET, comes after Smith’s closed-door testimony last month and follows his decision to drop both cases against Trump once he secured victory over Kamala Harris in November 2024.
Smith’s office charged Trump with trying to subvert the 2020 election results and mishandling classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Those efforts crumbled when Trump reclaimed the White House, winning 312 electoral votes to Harris’s 226 and edging out the popular vote at 49.8 percent.
Citing Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president, Smith wrapped up the cases, but not before drawing fire for subpoenaing phone records from Trump allies, including several GOP lawmakers like Senators Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley, and Ron Johnson.
During his December deposition, Smith defended the subpoenas, saying, “If Donald Trump had chosen to call a number of Democratic senators, we would have gotten toll records for Democratic Senators. So responsibility for why these records, why we collected them, that’s — that lies with Donald Trump.”
Critics argue this ignores broader concerns about privacy violations and potential breaches of congressional immunity, with some records spanning over two years for figures like Jordan himself.
Republicans also aim to question $20,000 payments from Smith’s team to an FBI confidential source tied to Trump intelligence gathering. They contend these moves, along with gag order requests and rushed trial schedules during the campaign, point to a coordinated effort to hamstring Trump’s bid for office. Trump himself has labeled Smith a “thug” who “belongs in jail,” and expressed a preference for public testimony, noting, “I’d rather see him testify publicly because there’s no way he can answer the questions.”
In his planned opening statement, Smith intends to stand firm: “Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity. 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.”
Yet, with Trump now in office and Republicans controlling the committee, the session could expose what some view as weaponized justice from the prior administration.
Whispers in Washington suggest deeper motives behind Smith’s pursuits, perhaps rooted in entrenched bureaucratic resistance to Trump’s agenda. After all, the probes ramped up amid a landscape where federal agencies have faced accusations of bias against conservatives. If today’s questioning uncovers inconsistencies, it might fuel calls for reforms to prevent future special counsels from targeting political opponents.
For many Americans weary of endless investigations, this hearing represents a chance for accountability. Trump’s return to power has shifted the dynamics, allowing oversight that was stifled under previous leadership. As Proverbs reminds us, “When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers” — a fitting lens for watching how Smith navigates the scrutiny.
The outcome could influence ongoing debates about DOJ independence and set precedents for handling high-profile cases. With live coverage expected across networks, viewers will judge for themselves whether Smith’s actions upheld the law or crossed into partisan territory. As the gavel falls, the real test will be whether truth emerges from the partisan fray.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.