Smith’s Lawfare Against Trump Designed To Generate Headlines

With a little more than a month to go before 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, Wednesday’s redacted release wasn’t much of a surprise. Smith’s “brief” asserting that Trump as president was not entitled to immunity and basic constitutional rights was “highly anticipated” by the vultures in corporate media and is, as expected, loaded with dubious legal claims. But making it public on Oct. 2, as absentee ballots go out across the country, was designed for maximum political damage to a Republican presidential candidate who has survived everything — including a bullet — that the left has fired at him. 

As expected, the accomplice media gobbled up Smith’s motion for immunity determinations, dutifully pushing the Democratic National Committee’s talking points that Trump is a threat to democracy. By releasing the political prosecution docs now, Democrats and their friends in corporate media will have the next few weeks to further paint their anti-democracy narrative that the Republican Party’s presidential candidate should be in prison, not on the ballot. 

Banana Republic Scale

The incendiary headlines were predictable.  

“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,” the far left New Republic proclaimed, despite the fact that much of the fodder in the prosecutor’s argument to keep his ailing case alive is old news. 

“Prosecutors say Trump was engaged in ‘private criminal effort’ to overturn 2020 election,” the Scripps News headline blared. 

Chutkan, an Obama nominee to the D.C. federal bench, dropped the documents right on cue. The redacted and unusually massive brief was designed to generate headlines and campaign ads. It’s election interference on a Banana Republic scale. 

Democrat Party mouthpiece, the Daily Beast, delighted in its headline, “Trump Is Absolutely Fuming Over the Release of Bombshell Election Case Doc.” He has every right to be. 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 the Democrat mishandled classified documents. Hur ultimately let the octogenarian off the hook, asserting 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” in which the agency holds off on major prosecutions that could be seen as interfering in the looming 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 his Truth Social platform. “They disobeyed their own rule in favor of complete and total election interference.”

“I did nothing wrong, they did!” the GOP’s presidential candidate added. 

A memo issued in June by Attorney General Merrick Garland reminded DOJ employees that they are “entrusted with the authority to enforce the laws of the United States and with the responsibility to do so in a neutral and impartial manner.”

Really? 

‘Fake’ Legal Arguments

Smith’s brief argues that his trumped-up case should be allowed to proceed despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in July that presidents are protected from prosecution for official acts while in office. The court ruled that immunity does not extend to a president’s unofficial acts. It’s here where Smith attempted to prove the validity of his shaky 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 “scheme” was a very public matter in which the president challenged a rigged Covid-era election riddled with a litany of irregularities and election law violations in battleground states where Democrat candidate Joe Biden narrowly claimed victory. 

In the brief, Biden administration federal prosecutors roll out the phony “fake electors” claims, legal arguments that have already failed in swing states where Trump and his legal team had pending lawsuits challenging the results of the election. 

“Ultimately, the defendant and his co-conspirators would use these fraudulent electoral votes — mere pieces of paper without the lawful imprimatur of a state executive — to falsely claim that in his ministerial role presiding over the January 6 certification, [Vice President Mike] Pence had the authority to choose the fraudulent slates over the legitimate ones, or to send the purportedly ‘dueling’ slates to the state legislatures for consideration anew,” the brief asserts.

As The Federalist has reported, the Pennsylvania and New Mexico attorneys general determined there was nothing illegal about Trump’s use of alternate electors in the weeks leading up to the presidential contest’s certification. Far-left Gov. Josh Shapiro was Pennsylvania’s attorney general at he the time. A Nevada court, too, has rejected a leftist-led indictment against six Republicans accused of submitting a false slate of electors for Trump. 

And last month the Prosecuting Attorneys Council of Georgia tossed so-called “false elector” charges that highly partisan Fulton County District Attorney General Fani Willis had hoped to file against Georgia’s state electors. As the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky wrote, “Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a former state senator … was one of Willis’ targets because he was one of the alternate, contingent electors selected for Trump. The votes of those electors would be in place if a court or the Legislature agreed with Trump that the presidential election had been wrongly decided in Georgia.” The ethically challenged Willis had to recuse herself in the case, and ultimately the Attorneys Council found there was no “criminal intent” in the alternate electors plan. Why would there be? The alternate electors strategy was employed by then-Democrat candidate John F. Kennedy in Hawaii in the closely contested 1960 election with no sweeping “fake elector” prosecutions. 

In Wisconsin, radical leftist Attorney General Josh Kaul’s case against Trump allies appears to be unraveling as well. The Democrat prosecutor’s own Department of Justice had previously found there was nothing illegal about the Trump campaign’s actions and that the Republicans who served as alternate electors did nothing wrong. But Kaul is willing to destroy the lives of a respected Wisconsin former judge and another long-time attorney, as well as an aide, for political advantage. 

The deeply flawed “fake electors” charges are among many kitchen sink allegations from a special counsel appointed by Biden’s weaponizer-in-chief, Attorney General Merrick Garland, underscoring the desperation of a politically motivated prosecutor with one last chance to try to take down Trump before the election. 

‘Largest Jury Verdict in History’ 

Trump’s lawyers argue that the prosecution “aims to proffer their untested and biased views to the Court and the public as if they are conclusive” and that “it’s incredibly unfair [to file this motion] in the sense that they’re able to put in the public record at this very sensitive time in our nation’s history.”

As the conservative victims of Wisconsin’s star chamber John Doe investigations often said, the process is the punishment. And the process is all about painting Trump as a “threat to democracy” in a coordinated messaging campaign, even as Democrats go about ripping down the pillars of representative democracy. 

Legal expert Jonathan Turley, appearing Wednesday on “Fox News Live,” said “Smith knows that this election will be the largest jury verdict in history.” Smith’s desperate attempt to keep his case alive and smear the former president “comes across as his closing election argument,” Turley added. 

“What’s striking about the filing is it all turns on what Trump honestly believed. You know, he [Smith] says that the through line of these charges — this is a quote — was deceit. Well, the president had attorneys saying that he did have a basis to challenge the election and that there could be a certification challenge,” the attorney said. “Democrats in the past had used this law to challenge certification. So, it comes down to a question of was it deceit. And, you know — for many people, this is sort of a repackaging without substantive changes.”

Will the blaring headlines from the usual corporate media suspects be enough to move the meter on extremely tight polls? Turley doesn’t think so. 

“It’s not going to change a lot of minds, but, you know, he goes through every detail here,” Turley told Fox News’ Brett Baier. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.