Bitter Jack Smith Proves Himself Guilty of Being a Weasel
Jack Smith lost at the Supreme Court, in federal court in Florida, and on Election Day. So, a week and 12 hours prior to Donald Trump again taking the oath of office, Smith, an illegally-appointed pretender special counsel, essentially bypassed both the legislative and judicial process to advance his own bill of attainder against the former and future president unable to mount a defense in his report.
The centrality of Smith’s argument that Trump knew he lost but refused to concede seems to instead undermine it.
“Evidence from a variety of sources established that Mr. Trump knew that there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, that many of the specific claims he made were untrue, and that he had lost the election,” Smith claims. “He knew this because some of the highest-ranking officials in his own Administration, including the Vice President, told him directly that there was no evidence to support his claims.”
One can simultaneously judge Trump as incorrect in his assessment of the outcome of the 2020 election and that this argument is rubbish. Trump knew something because other people told him that they disagreed? That’s Smith’s argument? Really?
“The rioters at the Capitol had been motivated and directed by Mr. Trump,” Smith further argues. The second part strikes as false; the first, unprovable. How does one prove what motivated all of those rioters? Given that the Justice Department has long charged that planning rather than spontaneity characterized Jan. 6, how could its representative here also claim that Trump’s speech riled up the crowd to action?
Smith concedes that “Mr. Trump at one point also told his supporters to ‘peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard.’” He fixates on his use of “the word ‘fight’ more than ten times in the speech” at the Jan. 6 rally.
Did he miss Elizabeth Warren’s three books with “fight” in the title or defense attorney David Schoen’s montage during the second Trump impeachment that showed prominent progressives calling to “punch [Trump] in the face,” “put a bullet in Donald Trump,” and “blow up the White House”? “Fight,” heretofore acting as a staple of political rhetoric, suddenly served as the grounds for decades in a penitentiary when used by a Republican.
Not just Trump delivering an address two miles away from the Capitol on Jan. 6, but his speech long afterward, according to Smith, buttressed his case. “Mr. Trump has provided additional evidence of his intent by continuing to support and ally himself with the people who attacked the Capitol,” he writes, citing Trump’s calling such people “patriots” and “hostages” and praising the “January 6 Choir” of inmates who sang behind bars.
Jan. 6 remains embarrassing for self-respecting Republicans. Sore losers who did not accept the results of the election indulged delusions that, at that late date, Vice President Mike Pence or Congress could block Joe Biden from taking the oath of office. Though eschewing this violent course, Democrats similarly, in a passive-aggressive manner characteristic of their party, had sought to subvert the democratic process, primarily through lawyers and bureaucrats, for much of the previous four years by pushing the Russian Collusion Hoax. Ironically, many of the same people, particularly within the Justice Department, peddling the notion that the Kremlin had installed Donald Trump acted shocked — shocked — when Republicans alleged skullduggery, too, by the election winner (and embraced tactics, advertised on television every day the previous summer, used by violent Black Lives Matter protesters — tactics tacitly praised by kneeling congressional Democrats wearing Kente cloth).
Nowhere in the report does Smith, to his credit, disturb the peace of Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Hill policeman who the New York Times falsely depicted as murdered by violent Trump supporters. The newspaper of the broken record claimed, two days after the riot, that “pro-Trump supporters attacked that citadel of democracy, overpowered Mr. [Brian] Sicknick, 42, and struck him in the head with a fire extinguisher, according to two law enforcement officials. With a bloody gash in his head, Mr. Sicknick was rushed to the hospital and placed on life support.”
This was completely false. Democrats nevertheless relied on this series of demonstrable lies in their second impeachment of Trump. Smith’s avoiding it demonstrates that four years later, the facts have won the battle against that convenient narrative.
But so many convenient narratives remain. Fortunately, Jack Smith’s cases do not.
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