‘Stand up for what's right': Melville House co-founder on publishing Jack Smith and Tulsa reports
The publisher, Melville House, will on Tuesday release The Jack Smith Report, a print and ebook edition of the special counsel's summation of his investigation of Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Later in February, the company will then publish another report the Department of Justice issued shortly before Trump returned to power, concerning the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
Dennis Johnson, co-founder of Melville House with his wife, Valerie Merians, said The Jack Smith Report would be published with no frills: 'It is just a report, and we're just reprinting it. We're not doing anything to it. We're not adding anything in the front or back. We're not getting star introductions or anything. We just wanted it to speak for itself.'
But he also described an urgent need to put out physical copies, in light of Trump's push to revenge himself on prosecutors who worked for Smith and FBI agents who investigated the January 6 attack on Congress.
Johnson said the same for the Tulsa report, amid a drive to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion policies which has resulted in the disappearances of official online resources related to the history of racism and civil rights.
Johnson has published federal reports before, achieving notable sales for the CIA Torture Report (2014) and the Mueller Report (2019), the latter concerning Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.
Melville House has always been 'mission-driven', Johnson said, describing a company 'founded as a minor but sincere attempt to stand up to the [election] of George Bush'.
Nonetheless, after Trump's victory over Kamala Harris in November, Johnson and his staff found themselves 'just stumped. We had no ideas … we just felt totally defeated … and then there was this murmuring about the Jack Smith report coming. And when we heard that, after two or three months of being in a bunk and a daze, we just immediately thought we should do that.'
Smith was appointed in November 2022, under the Biden administration. He investigated 'whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election', as well as Trump's retention of classified documents after leaving power.
Ultimately, Smith filed four criminal charges relating to election subversion and 40 concerning retention of classified records. Trump pleaded not guilty but his lawyers and a compliant Florida judge secured delays, meaning neither case reached trial before November.
After Trump's election win, Smith closed his cases. Before Trump returned to power, the Department of Justice released part one of Smith's report, covering his work on Trump's election subversion. Part two, on Trump's retention of classified information, remains under wraps.
Melville House has moved fast. Johnson said such 'crash publishing' required hard work and help from printers, retailers and more. But the Jack Smith Report, he said, would 'launch into a very different book culture than the last time we were in this predicament, in 2016. People are very afraid.
'We did the Mueller Report and there were two other significant publications. There was Simon and Schuster, they're one of the biggest publishers in the world, and there was Skyhorse, which is independent but much bigger than us … and yet we got our book on the bestseller list.
'We knew that wasn't going to happen this time, because the big houses, we're guessing, are intimidated – don't want any hard feelings with the White House. Trump has already informed Penguin he's going to sue them about a critical biography they published last year [Lucky Loser, by Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.] And the publisher with Skyhorse [Tony Lyons] actually worked on the presidential campaign of Robert F Kennedy Jr [now Trump's nominee for health secretary] so we knew he wasn't going to put [the Smith report] out. So we'd have the field to ourselves, which is good.'
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'I think there's a world of independent booksellers who are eager to be supporting something that speaks to the moment, that somehow stands up for what's right.'
It took the Department of Justice more than 100 years to stand up a proper investigation of the Tulsa Race Massacre – one of the most unjustly obscure episodes in US history, in which hundreds were killed when Greenwood, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black neighborhood, was destroyed by a white mob.
No charges were brought. Under Joe Biden, a new investigation was carried out by a cold case unit of the justice department civil rights division named for Emmett Till, a Black teen murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955. The Tulsa report was released on 10 January. Ten days later, Trump returned to power – and announced sweeping changes at the civil rights division.
Calling the new Tulsa report 'nauseating and gripping', Johnson said: 'We went to the Library of Congress and found a lot of the photos which might have been part of the initial report when the massacre happened, that the predecessor of the FBI did, the investigation this report criticizes. They supplement the information but it only takes a few pictures to make the point. They're just aerial shots of devastation. It's like Munich in world war two. Hiroshima. Total devastation.'
Johnson hopes his editions of the Jack Smith and Tulsa reports will find places in 'libraries and classrooms' as well as homes. When he was a boy, he said, adults he knew 'had the Pentagon Papers paperback in their home, they might have had the Warren Commission and later the Starr Report. I want people to feel these reports are part of the American historic record.'
The Jack Smith Report is published in the US on Tuesday
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