(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) After Judge Aileen Cannon ruled Monday that there was nothing preventing the partial release of ex-special counsel Jack Smith’s report outlining his lawfare attack on President-elect Donald Trump, the Biden Justice Department made haste to do so, declaring that Trump would have been convicted if brought to trial.
Undoubtedly, given the corruption of the D.C. Circuit Court system and what we bore witness to previously in the kangaroo court of New York Judge Juan Merchan, it was safe to say a politically motivated conviction was all but assured.
However, since it was the voters who acted as judge and jury in this unprecedented case, Trump instead was acquitted on all counts. That makes Smith’s report and call for Trump’s incarceration tantamount, in some ways, to a seditious conspiracy of his own.
At the very least, Smith and his team of activist DOJ lawyers deserve to be investigated for malicious prosecution given the specific circumstances of the investigation.
Consider the following:
- In dismissing his “classified documents” trial, Judge Cannon concluded that Smith was never legitimately appointed as special counsel in the first place since he was not vetted or approved specifically by the U.S. Senate.
- The case for Trump’s so-called election interference was built largely around the criminal referral from House Democrats’ partisan Jan. 6 committee, which was subsequently proven to have illegally tampered with witnesses and withheld vast amounts of exculpatory evidence as it focused on a televised show-trial ahead of the 2022 midterm election.
- Smith used the secretive grand-jury process to obtain the initial indictment against Trump in Washington, D.C. for a case that was to be heard in Florida, an ominous sign of the sort of overreach and disregard for legal protocol that would characterize his dual witch hunts.
- Smith sought to circumvent normal procedures when it became clear that he was racing the clock to bring his case to trial. He colluded with Judge Tanya Chutkan to re-file an amended complaint after the U.S. Supreme Court excoriated his first attempt with its presidential immunity ruling, although typically the defense would file a motion in response.
- Smith and Chutkan maintained throughout that Trump was just like any other defendant, but they selectively invoked the special circumstances of the case when it suited them, such as imposing a highly unusual gag order that broadly prevented Trump from publicly criticizing key players in the trial.
The key takeaway from Smith’s 174-page volume 1 report appeared to be the assertion, based on witness accounts, that Trump knew he had “lost” the 2020 election.
Notwithstanding the probable inadmissability of the evidence in light of the presidential immunity decision, this, like many of Trump’s statements in public and private, appears to be a function of his trying to convey multiple ideas in a single thought using his highly distilled way of speaking.
Indeed, on one hand, Trump “lost” the election when the Electoral College determined in December 2020 that Joe Biden was the winner. However, up until the certification of that vote by the Joint Session of Congress on Jan. 6, it was still something that was eligible to be contested—the fact of which Democrats have reaffirmed in every Republican presidential victory for the past several decades.
Moreover, serious questions surrounding the legitimacy of the vote in blue states that manipulated election rules under the auspices of the pandemic have never been fully weighed since the courts instead opted to punt the issue for the sake of political stability.
Rather than hearing Trump’s valid election challenges, many used technicalities, including a lack of standing and laches (i.e. issues with the timing of the case) to summarily dismiss them with no determination on the merit of the cases.
As I wrote shortly thereafter, the greatest evidence of guilt was, in a way, the determination that the Left had to prevent the full set of facts from emerging. Smith’s prosecution of valid political challenges only underscores the democracy-chilling measures to which they resorted in order to install Joe Biden as president. In terms of the punitive lawfare waged against Trump and his allies, of course, that was but the tip of the iceberg.
However, another clear piece of evidence has since emerged that calls into question the validity of the 2020 vote: the vanishing voters in 2024. While Trump’s gain of roughly 2 million voters may be attributable to the shifting public mode after four years of Democrat failure and corruption—including a public rebuke of the two-tiered justice system—nothing can account for the remaining deficit of around 5 million voters who turned out for Biden in 2020 but opted to sit out the 2024 race. This sudden burst of apathy toward a candidate who, Democrats claimed, posed an existential threat to Democracy, evidently allowed Trump once again to clinch all of the swing states needed for an Electoral College blowout.
In short, Smith’s case arguing that Trump knew he “lost” the election would require definitive proof that Trump did, indeed, lose the 2020 election.
The only way Smith and company can argue their case for a criminal conviction would be for them to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump had no cause to challenge the outcome of the election.
In light of the failure to offer convincing proof of the legitimacy of the 2020 race, it is vital to democracy that those who waged the attack on it by manipulating legal avenues to effect political outcomes be held fully accountable.
While Trump may wish to put it all behind him and focus on his role as a bipartisan dealbroker, it is his obligation to the American people to prevent such an egregious abuse from happening again.
Smith should, accordingly, be prosecuted in Florida, where many of the government’s crimes transpired, including the outrageous raid of Mar-a-Lago in which Attorney General Merrick Garland’s authorization to use deadly force.
At least two times thereafter, unhinged vigilantes took cues from the Biden administration’s extremist rhetoric in their own attempts to use deadly force against a top political rival.
It is appropriate for AG-in-waiting Pam Bondi and pending FBI Director Kash Patel to present a full picture of the extent to which Smith conspired with the Justice Department and the Biden White House, as well as the full scope of communication from his sealed witness depositions.
Since he has opted to selectively release his version of the story, we must now have a complete understanding of the steps he took to thwart the democratic process—and how close he came to succeeding but for the will of the voters.
Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
