With a little over a month until the election, Trump-hating U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has made public Trump-hating Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page justification for depriving former President Donald Trump of his First Amendment rights.
As October surprises go, the redacted release on Wednesday was hardly a shock. Smith’s “brief,” claiming that Trump as president was not entitled to immunity or basic constitutional rights, was “highly anticipated” by the corporate media vultures and is, unsurprisingly, filled with dubious legal arguments. By releasing it on October 2, as absentee ballots are sent out across the country, the goal seems clear: to maximize political damage to a Republican presidential candidate who has endured everything the left has thrown at him — including a metaphorical bullet.
True to form, the media wasted no time amplifying Smith’s immunity motion, eagerly pushing the Democratic National Committee’s talking points that Trump is a threat to democracy. This timing gives Democrats and their media allies several weeks to hammer home the narrative that the Republican nominee should be in prison, not on the ballot.
Banana Republic Scale
The headlines were as predictable as they were incendiary.
“11 damning details in Jack Smith’s new brief in the Trump election case,” Politico screamed.
“Jack Smith’s Stunning New Evidence Against Trump Revealed,” proclaimed the far-left New Republic, despite the fact that much of the prosecutor’s argument is old news.
“Prosecutors say Trump was engaged in ‘private criminal effort’ to overturn 2020 election,” blared Scripps News.
Chutkan, an Obama nominee to the D.C. federal bench, released the massive, redacted brief precisely on cue. The timing and scale of the release were clearly designed to generate headlines and fuel campaign ads. It’s election interference on a “Banana Republic scale.”
Democratic mouthpiece The Daily Beast delighted in its headline, “Trump Is Absolutely Fuming Over the Release of Bombshell Election Case Doc.” And Trump has every reason to be upset. President Joe Biden, who clearly doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to be president, was furious when DOJ Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report concluded that Biden mishandled classified documents. Hur ultimately let the octogenarian off the hook, explaining that Biden “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
‘Department of Injustice’
So much for the Department of Justice’s “60-day rule,” which is supposed to prohibit major prosecutions that could interfere with an upcoming election.
“For 60 days prior to an election, the Department of Injustice is supposed to do absolutely nothing that would taint or interfere with a case,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “They disobeyed their own rule in favor of complete and total election interference.”
“I did nothing wrong, they did!” the GOP presidential candidate added.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s June memo reminded DOJ employees of their duty to enforce U.S. laws in a “neutral and impartial manner.” Really?
‘Fake’ Legal Arguments
Smith’s brief argues that his flimsy case against Trump should proceed despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in July, which reaffirmed that presidents are protected from prosecution for official acts while in office. The court clarified that immunity does not extend to unofficial acts, and it is here that Smith tried to validate his weak case.
“The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so,” the brief declares. “Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.”
Trump’s so-called “scheme” was, in reality, a public challenge to a rigged COVID-era election, riddled with irregularities and election law violations in battleground states where Joe Biden narrowly claimed victory.
Smith’s team trotted out the discredited “fake electors” narrative, which had already failed in several states where Trump’s legal team filed lawsuits. As The Federalist noted, attorneys general in Pennsylvania and New Mexico found no wrongdoing in Trump’s use of alternate electors. Nevada courts also rejected leftist-led indictments against Republicans accused of submitting false slates of electors for Trump.
In Georgia, the Prosecuting Attorneys Council dismissed “false elector” charges that partisan Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had hoped to file. As the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky pointed out, Georgia Lt. Gov. Burt Jones was one of the alternate electors for Trump. The use of alternate electors was lawful and intended as a contingency if the courts or legislature sided with Trump. Willis was forced to recuse herself from the case, and no criminal intent was found.
The use of alternate electors wasn’t new. In 1960, Democrat John F. Kennedy employed a similar strategy in Hawaii during a closely contested election, without facing sweeping prosecutions.
Wisconsin’s radical Attorney General Josh Kaul is also seeing his case against Trump allies fall apart. Kaul’s own Department of Justice had previously determined there was nothing illegal about the Trump campaign’s actions, and that the alternate electors did nothing wrong. But Kaul seems willing to destroy the careers of respected legal professionals for political gain.
These discredited “fake electors” charges are part of a broader attempt by a desperate, politically motivated prosecutor to take down Trump before the election.
‘Largest Jury Verdict in History’
Trump’s legal team argues that the prosecution is trying to “proffer their untested and biased views to the Court and the public as if they are conclusive” and that the timing of the filing is “incredibly unfair” given the sensitive state of the nation.
As conservative victims of Wisconsin’s John Doe investigations often said, “the process is the punishment.” The real goal of this process is to paint Trump as a “threat to democracy,” even as Democrats dismantle the pillars of representative democracy.
