Anyone with a shred of objectivity and clear eyes should be able to see the current legal entanglements of former President Donald Trump for what they actually are: politicized, spurious and weaponized charges meant to hamstring the chief political rival of the incumbent.
Due in no small part to the murky legal footing his opponents appear to be standing on, Trump has thus far avoided the political “kill shot” that his critics are so desperately pining for.
That desperation is starting to show, however, as even Biden’s stalwart allies at The Washington Post are beginning to question the true agenda of special counsel Jack Smith.
As a quick recap: Trump is facing a quartet of charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
The former president has obviously denied all of these charges, but that hasn’t stopped Smith from overturning every legal stone to find some way — any way — to catch that rascally rabbit.
Smith’s primary focus, the charge that Trump attempted to illegally overturn the 2020 general election results, has apparently turned into such a three-ring circus of partisan hackery, that The Washington Post (the Jeff Bezos-owned, establishment media titan that’s always grousing about democracy dying in darkness) couldn’t help but call it out.
Post contributor Jason Willick penned a Tuesday opinion piece that all but called out the naked biases of Smith … and it’s about time.
In an opinion piece titled “Politics are now clearly shaping Jack Smith’s Trump prosecution,” (again … duh), Willick pointed out a pair of instances that suggested the special counsel was beginning to jump the shark.
Here’s how Willick succinctly and accurately began his piece (it should be noted Willick still works for WaPo, so the disdain for Trump is evident, though that almost helps buttress his argument against Smith): “There are real legal problems with special counsel Jack Smith’s election-interference case against Donald Trump.
Should Jack Smith be removed as special counsel?
“The former president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election was despicable, but political lying isn’t generally a crime. Smith’s case thus must rely on some of the vaguest laws in the federal penal code, applying them in untested ways.”
Those “untested ways” include a September gag order clearly meant to suppress political speech.
But more recently, Smith made the novel move of taking a filing to the Supreme Court that, in short, was asking them to expedite the trial against Trump.
Willick described that move: “Now, in a filing at the Supreme Court, Smith has all but announced that his prosecutorial timeline is controlled by the 2024 general election in which Trump is likely to be a candidate.”
That Monday filing effectively sought a ruling from SCOTUS to determine if a president can be prosecuted based on actions he took in office — a sticking point throughout all of these thorny legal issues.
In short, Trump is arguing that he has political immunity because the actions he’s being investigated for were done as official presidential actions.
That claim is to make its way through the appellate courts first, but Smith is trying to leapfrog that process by going directly to the Supreme Court — a move that’s raising some eyebrows.
Willick described it as Smith attempting to “fast-track the Trump trial based on what can be described only as a political timetable.”
“This argument is circular: The case must be accelerated, because if it’s not accelerated, it will be delayed,” Willick explained. “But trials are delayed all the time, sometimes for years. Smith doesn’t say what he means: If the justices don’t take the case now, the chances of completing a trial before the 2024 election will go down.
“If Trump is not tried and convicted by the election, the chances of a Biden victory will take a hit.
“Trump, of course, wants to delay the trial out of self-preservation. If he wins the election, his Justice Department could halt his federal prosecutions. But if Smith’s decisions were independent of the political calendar, that would be of no concern to him.
“His job is supposedly to work for the Justice Department — not to try to influence which party controls the Justice Department at a given time.”
Willick eventually concluded his piece with a sobering realization: “The special counsel is an aggressive political actor seeking a political outcome as much as a legal one. The fiction that he is anything else is outliving its usefulness.”
As is so clearly laid out by Willick, it’s clear that Smith and Biden’s DOJ are not at all interested in “justice,” as they so often claim.
If they did, who cares if the trial gets delayed? Justice is justice.
But the fact that Smith is trying to squeeze in and expedite a lengthy legal process shortly before the 2024 general election shows that the left is far more interested with crippling Trump than any actual semblance of justice.
And that increasingly obvious fact is only starting to gain traction, if this blistering piece from The Washington Post, of all outlets, is to be believed.
