The story of the Jack Smith Wreckage is just beginning.
He intends to help delegitimize the 2024 election.
You may have noticed that the Left reacted negatively when the Supreme Court announced that it would consider Donald Trump’s immunity case.
The reaction was telling in a variety of ways. It proved, as I mentioned the other day, how conspiratorial prominent left-wing pundits are, as well as how invested many of them are in the notion that Jack Smith’s January 6 lawsuit will make Trump’s re-election impossible.
Perhaps most importantly, the firestorm served as further proof of Jack Smith’s misguided prosecution.
The lamentations and denunciations over the last four days have been astounding, but we haven’t seen anything yet, whichever way Smith’s case turns out.
If Trump is convicted in the case and loses the election, he and his allies will have a ready-made argument that the election was rigged—aa Biden-administration prosecutor rushed the case to trial on a political timetable to get the result, a felony conviction, that all polling predicted would harm Trump’s chances the most.
If there is no trial before the election and Trump wins, the Left will have a ready-made argument that the election was illegitimate—the MAGA court did Trump’s bidding by delaying the proceedings or ruling in favor of the former president on some legal question; the public was denied crucial information that would have been provided by a trial; An insurrectionist was permitted to skate when he should not have been on the vote, etc.
In summary, Jack Smith is a delegitimization machine. His prosecution is a stick of TNT in the midst of an already volatile election.
Left-wing opinion-makers have attacked the Supreme Court in recent days, expressing concern that if the January 6 trial does not take place, justice as they understand it would be denied; Trump may win the election again and order the prosecution to halt. However, their concern that Trump would not be stifled by the lawsuit as they had hoped and expected adds to their indignation.
“Democrats in my text chains and on social media are equal parts enraged and despondent over the news,” former Obama advisor Dan Pfeiffer wrote in his Substack newsletter on the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the immunity case.
“Some worried Democrats comforted themselves by believing that Trump’s chances of returning to the White House would end with a conviction,” he stated, which wasn’t exactly startling news. “No trial before the election means no conviction.”
A key issue with Jack Smith’s thesis is that it is fundamentally political in two ways. One, it involves a political crime—Trump’s actions following the 2020 election—rrather than a strictly legal one. Two, it is taking place in a political setting, right before a national election, with Smith wanting to go to trial before the election and the prosecution’s supporters counting on it to generate the desired political outcome.
So, even if the Court’s objections were foolish and worthless, they were comprehensible to some degree. Of course, a politicized prosecution will be viewed through a political lens; the Court’s critics simply assume that the conservative majority views the Smith case in the same way they do, as a proxy struggle over Trump’s campaign.
Pfeiffer believes the Court’s decision to consider the case “may be the most blatant Supreme Court intervention in a campaign since Bush v. Gore.”
Smith’s case shows impeachment by other methods rather than traditional prosecution. As we explained in The McCarthy Report last week, the Smith prosecution serves as both a replacement for impeachment and an indictment on insurrection charges. Regarding the former, Smith is frantic to disqualify Trump before the election, just as a conviction in a Senate impeachment trial would have done. Regarding the latter, Smith has presented questionable, legally new allegations in place of the insurrection case, which are not supported by the facts or the law.
This makes the Smith prosecution a risky, not to mention ill-advised, undertaking.
It is possible that it will not be able to proceed to trial until November. For his side, Ian Millhiser of Vox is struggling with the possibility that there will be no “deus ex machina” to keep Trump out of the White House.
“Donald Trump will be defeated, if at all, in November at the ballot box,” he wrote. “The only way his opponents can make that happen is by voting for Joe Biden and encouraging others to do the same.
“There is no other solution.”
Yes, the individuals who claim to value democracy the most may have to win an election fair and square without Jack Smith placing his thumb on the scale. That causes them considerable concern, and if the outcome is not favorable, they will never accept it. They had thought Jack Smith would be a crutch, but if he isn’t, he will be an excuse.
