(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) The Biden Justice Department’s chief Trump headhunter requested a trial date of Jan. 2, 2024, to launch his prosecution of the former president for challenging the results of the highly controversial 2020 election, with his hopes to wrap a convict’s bow around the neck of his boss’s chief obstacle to another term in the White House.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s requested timing for the trial — two weeks before the massively consequential GOP Iowa Caucus — was roundly criticized as another gross display of election interference targeting the Republican frontrunner’s prospects for securing the party’s nomination.
🚨Special Counsel Jack Smith recommends Dec 11, 2023 for jury selection and Jan 2, 2024 for trial in Trump’s J6 election conspiracy case
It’s no coincidence that the Iowa Caucus is January 15
The DOJ is now engaging in election interference
That’s the real crime here pic.twitter.com/wumB0w3lA5
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) August 10, 2023
“Deranged Jack Smith has just asked for a trial on the Biden Indictment to take place on January 2nd., just ahead of the important Iowa Caucuses,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Only an out of touch lunatic would ask for such a date, ONE DAY into the New Year, and maximum Election Interference with IOWA!”
“How is this not election interference?” asked West Virginia Republican Attorney General Patrick Morrisey. “I think every American has to rise up and say, ‘No. These political prosecutions have to stop.’”
Iowa might be the place were the uprising starts. And if Smith’s intention was to twist the partisan ties of the Obama-appointed federal judge overseeing the J6 case, who worked at the same law firm with Hunter Biden, to secure a Trump conviction, the outcome could face heavy backlash that would significantly favor Trump in Iowa.
The state’s caucus has a history of proving a reliable indicator of a candidate’s success in securing the party’s nomination, and a new poll suggests boiling discontent with the DOJ could give Trump a campaign boost in Iowa, regardless of how the case unfolds in front of a likely D.C. jury.
A nearly 60% majority of Republican voters said they agreed with the statement that “The lawlessness of the persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s,” which echoed the charge Trump’s team posted on Truth Social when the DOJ unleashed its J6 indictment.
A Daily Mail poll conducted after the indictment was issued, and Trump’s response had been widely circulated, surveyed 600 likely Republican caucus-goers in Iowa. “Only 28 percent disagreed with the comparison, driven largely by supporters of Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator. Half of his supporters said they did not agree with the Trump campaign statement,” the Daily Mail reported.
In addition to the 57% of all Republicans surveyed who did agree with the brutal assessment of the DOJ, a whopping 73% of Trump’s supporters agreed with the sentiment.
Mirroring the poll’s results, floundering presidential hopeful Will Hurd was nearly booed off the stage at last month’s Iowa Republican Party’s Lincoln Dinner, when he claimed Trump was only running for president “to stay out of prison.”
Delivering his own remarks at the same event, Trump said of his indictments, “If I weren’t running, I would have nobody coming after me. Or if I was losing by a lot, I would have nobody coming after me.”
Iowa Republicans’ shared agreement with that claim could prove critical if the DOJ’s J6 trial proceeds on pace with the Iowa Caucus. Trump, it should be noted, has declared that a sham DOJ conviction and prison wouldn’t sidetrack his presidential run.
“We have seen Republicans say Trump is being pursued unfairly, and people agree that the series of indictments are a ‘witch hunt,’” said James Johnson, co-founder of Republican polling firm J.L. Partners.
Taking it a step further, the poll showed Iowa “Republicans also think the Department of Justice is acting in the same way that the Nazis did in the 1930s,” Johnson said.
“However shocking that may sound, this is another statistic in a long line of others that demonstrates the loyalty of many of Trump’s voters — and how the indictments have only emboldened their support rather than undermined it.”
