Tag Archives: Jack Smith

Diary of the Second Addams Administration 4.

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            “Teflon Don.” 

            Republicans long accused Democrats of waging “lawfare” against Donald Trump, either to bait the Republicans into making him their candidate so that Joe Biden could beat him in November 2024 or to render him incapable of holding office without asking the voters what they preferred.  There is something to be said on both sides of some of the cases, and nothing at all that can be said against others.[1]   

            In early December 2024, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked a judge to dismiss—without prejudice—two cases against President-elect Donald Trump.  Department of Justice policy bars prosecuting a sitting president.  In late January 2025, Judge Juan Merchan decided that he couldn’t “encroach…on the highest office in the land” by jailing President-elect Donald Trump for his conviction in the New York City hush-money case.  The conviction stands.[2] 

            Soon afterward, President Trump issued a blanket pardon for almost 1,600 people convicted by federal prosecutors for their part in the 6 January 2021 riot.  Why did he do this when two-thirds of Americans opposed pardons for “violent” offenders?  Even his Vice President, J.D. Vance had not expected him to go that far. 

            Trump went beyond just releasing the worst of his supporters.  He appointed another supporter, Edward Martin, Jr., as interim United States attorney for Washington, D.C.  Martin immediately ordered that all pending cases be dismissed.  Then he ordered a review of the use of felony obstruction charges against the rioters.  Democrats feared that the released rioters might feel empowered to threaten their prosecutors.[3] 

            On his way out the door, “I’m-still-President” Joe Biden—predictably, understandably—broke his promise not to pardon his son Hunter Biden.  He pardoned him for both those things of which he had been convicted and of anything else he might have done since 2014.  Biden argued that Hunter had been “selectively and unfairly prosecuted” by Biden’s own Justice Department.[4]  Believing that Trump would seek “revenge” on everyone who displeased him, Biden issued pardons to people like Dr. Anthony Fauci, General Mark Milley, the members of the House 6 January investigative committee, and the Capitol police officers who testified before the committee.  He also pardoned another five members of his family.[5] 

            Angry Special Counsels took their last shots.  David Weiss, who had investigated Hunter Biden, denounced Joe Biden’s “baseless allegations.”  Jack Smith, who had investigated Trump, insisted that he could have convicted him if he hadn’t been able to shelter in the White House.[6] 

“I fought the law and the law…lost.”  Grubby versus Filthy. 

[1] Alvin Bragg and Laetitia James both ran for their state elective offices with promises to prosecute Trump.  Fani Willis may have had a partisan motivation, but she built a substantial (perhaps overly ambitious) case.  Jack Smith seems to have had Trump dead to right on the purloined documents case.  He probably had at least as good a case as did Willis on the election interference case.  For Republican charges of “lawfare,” see “Trump: Beyond the reach of law,” The Week, 13 December 2024, p. 17. 

[2] “Trump: Prosecutions end with a whimper,” The Week, 24 January 2025, p. 17. 

[3] “Impunity: MAGA violence is A-OK,” The Week, 7 February 2025, p. 16. 

[4] “Biden: Why he broke his promise not to pardon Hunter,” The Week, 13 December 2024, p. 6. 

[5] “Biden: A flurry of last-minute pardons,” The Week, 31 January 2025, p. 17. 

[6] The Week, 24 January 2025, pp. 6 and 7. 

Goldsmith on the Trump Prosecution.

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The Justice Department and the FBI have suffered a series of self-inflicted wounds in the past decade.  These have undermined trust in the institutions among voters, a distrust which Donald Trump is only too happy to exploit.[1]  In the view of one Never-Trump Republican, the prosecution of Trump may make it worse. 

The 2016 Clinton Campaign inspired the creation of the Steele Dossier, a fake compilation alleging close collaboration between Donald Trump and the Russians.  The Obama-Biden administration’s Justice Department officials knew it was fake from early on, but a) permitted the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation and b) continued the Mueller Investigation from May 2017 to March 2019.  FBI officials high and lower who were supervising the investigations displayed a hostility toward Donald Trump.  They broke a number of rules–always to Trump’s disadvantage–in the course of the investigations.  It isn’t Trump supporters who say this.  It’s the Inspector General of the Department of Justice. 

President Biden’s Justice Department reportedly dragged its feet on beginning an investigation of Donald Trump’s effort to hold onto power.  Then, with Republican primary season looming and Trump running even with Biden in opinion polls, the Justice Department moved with lightning speed to indict Trump.  Furthermore, the federal indictments relating to Trump trying to stay in power involve “novel applications of three criminal laws and raises tricky issues of Mr. Trump’s intent, his freedom of speech and the contours of presidential power.”  That is, it’s far from being a slam-dunk and it is easy to interpret as specious.    

Then, “honesty is the best policy” has never held an unchallenged sway in American politics.  (Doesn’t matter what my Mom thought should be the case.)  Donald Trump is being charged as an extreme example of behavior that is not uncommon.[2]    

In contrast, the Biden Justice Department had been gored in recent weeks, by IRS whistleblowers who have testified under oath, that the Justice Department dragged out its investigation of President Biden’s wayward son until the statute of limitations had expired on the most serious charges, and had obstructed searches and interrogations.  Only the glare of media criticism from the Republicans caused the seams in the “plea bargain”—in which the government did all the giving and Hunter Biden all the getting—to come un-stitched. 

Does any sane person want a large share of the electorate saying that “The law for the President’s enemy works one way; the law for the President’s son works another way”?    

If American politics was not polarized and poisoned, the institutional problems could be absorbed and dealt with.  In current conditions, however, the prosecution of Donald Trump “may well have terrible consequences beyond the department for our politics and the rule of law.”  Tit-for-tat investigations leading to ever more dubious special prosecutors pursuing ever more dubious prosecutions could bend the legal system to the worst elements in politics.  (One of the things that brought Zelensky to office as president of Ukraine was the public revulsion against the subordination of the judicial system to competing political factions.)    

Jack Smith may see the prosecution of Trump as “protecting democratic institutions and vindicating the rule of law”; but “American democracy and the rule of law [may be], on balance, degraded as a result” of that prosecution. 

[1] Jack Goldsmith, “The Prosecution of Donald Trump Could Have Terrible Consequences,” NYT (on-line), 8 August 2023.  On Goldsmith, see: Jack Goldsmith – Wikipedia 

[2] There is much to criticize in the actions of Adam Schiff as he investigated, then prosecuted, and then investigated again Donald Trump, all in the shadow of the end of Diane Feinstein’s time as Senator from California.