Commentary
You’ve heard about all the charges Special Counsel Jack Smith has included in his indictment of former President Trump, but I thought you should know a little about Smith’s background and what’s being said about him.
I won’t go into the weeds with details, but Smith is a hardcore partisan with a record of prosecutorial misconduct, a history of distorting the law to achieve convictions against Republicans.
There was witness tampering and illegal wiretapping in his conviction of former GOP Congressman Rick Renzi, and his prosecution of Virginia’s former Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell on corruption was overturned by the Supreme Court.
Here are some thoughts
Breitbart
“Under the indictment itself, Jack Smith could be himself indicted. He told a direct lie in this indictment. He purported to describe the speech President Trump made on January 6th. And he left out the key words, when President Trump said, ‘I want you to demonstrate peacefully and patriotically.’ You know, a lie by omission, under the law, can be as serious as a lie by commission.” – Alan Dershowitz, Harvard Law School professor emeritus.
Suggesting that Smith himself could be charged with fraud, Dershowitz went on to note that “The fact that Smith repeated the error of the House impeachment managers would appear deliberate, because these phrases were the crux of Trump’s Senate trial.
PJ Media
Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team has acknowledged they incorrectly claimed that they had submitted all the necessary evidence as mandated by the law in the classified documents case against Donald Trump. That’s basically a euphemism for getting caught committing prosecutorial misconduct.” – Matt Margolis, columnist
Margolis reported that “Prosecutors ‘discovered’ that a crucial video intended to be presented as evidence had not been appropriately processed and uploaded to the designated platform for the defense to review during the investigation.” The Brady rule requires prosecutors to disclose all evidence and information favorable to the defendant.
Further, he cited, “It sure feels like Smith is up to his same old tricks in order to do the bidding of the Biden administration and make himself a hero to the left.”
The Transom
“Not everything that’s bad in politics is illegal – especially in a country that has the First Amendment. Joe Biden’s Department of Justice seems to have forgotten that. At least, that’s the conclusion to be drawn from the latest federal indictment of Donald Trump.” – Dan McLauglin, A Mockery of Justice
Writing about the charge of conspiracy to defraud the federal government and obstruct federal proceedings, McLauglin notes that “crimes are supposed to be about the law – which has to be plain enough to govern us all. No criminal charges like this have ever been brought before, and it is far from clear that any law was broken.”
Smith “charges that Trump spread lies to the public and smeared elections officials. That’s dirty politics, but it’s politics.”
Racket News
“Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment is a case within a case, a prosecutorial enchilada filled with things for people of all political persuasions to hate. The outside is a shell of conventional conspiracy prosecution. Inside, it’s a deranged authoritarian fantasy.” – Matt Taibbi, The Electric Kool-Aid Indictment
After noting the opening passages of Smtih’s indictment that Trump made “knowingly false statements,” claiming he created an “intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger,” intended to “erode public faith in the administration of the election,” Taibbi proceeded to dissect the document with highlighted words and sentences.
“This prosecution,” Taibbi says, “puts Americans in the same conundrum they’ve been in since the beginning of Trump years: forced once again to choose between a serial line-crosser … and a gang of never-Trump lawfare aficionados who’s like to revive the Alien and Sedition Acts on the other.”
The Wall Street Journal
“With Jack Smith’s unprecedented indictment of a politician for engaging in “a conspiracy to defraud the United States, be prepared for this new and startingly elastic precedent to ensnare plenty of others.” – Kimberly A. Strassel, The Unprecedented Jack Smith
Strassel makes the point that even Smith concedes that a politician can lie, yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government function, he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country. Prove that.
“How many times have we heard politicians act on dubious legal claims?” she asks, citing the lawsuits filed by Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000, and others involving Barack Obama and yes, Joe Biden. Rep. Adam Schiff lied repeatedly in his attempts to nail Trump. Was he defrauding the government? Space will not permit me to recall the details for you.
The Wall Street Journal
“Special Counsel Jack Smith and a District of Columbia grand jury accuse Mr. Trump of conspiring to steal the 2020 election and charge him, among other things, with defrauding the U.S.
“The president is immune from civil and criminal liability for actions taken in the execution of the office. That immunity is absolute, like the immunity accorded to judges and prosecutors.” – David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, This Trump Indictment Imperils the Presidency
The authors, Rivkin and Casey, who practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington DC, write that the “latest indictment of Donald Trump takes the courts and the country into uncharted territory.
“It was Mr. Trump’s constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” they added, “He had no power to direct state officials’ actions, but urging them to ensure the integrity of federal elections could fall within the outer bounds of his responsibility.”
Now My Thoughts
Like the writers I have quoted above, I too, am struck by the weak case being brought by Smith. While conceding that Trump’s lying about the 2020 election is protected speech, he frequently cites Trump’s guilt of “conspiracy.” However, as Wall Street Journal columnist Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. noted, “conspiracy is the crime of agreeing and planning with another to commit some other crime. That crime, which Special Counsel Jack Smith calls fraud, consists of Mr. Trump appealing to public officials and the courts to act on false claims, which, in the absence of evidence, none did.”
As I have written before, I believe the Deep State helped secure victory for Biden in 2020, not voting irregularities in some states. A new CNN poll found that 69 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning voters believe Biden’s win wasn’t legitimate. Among registered voters who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020, 75 percent express doubts on that election.
Based on what I have read in the indictment and in the writings of knowledgeable legal minds, Smith has an uphill climb to convict Trump.
May God continue to bless the United States of America.
