We must circle back to the charges Special Counsel Jack Smith slapped Trump with last week. Smith, who has already indicted the former president over the classified documents scandal, has filed new charges against Mr. Trump over January 6, which should come as no shock, given how creative anti-Trump lawyers have become with the legalese.
Spencer wrote about the indictment:
The indictment lists four violations of which the 45th president is being accused:
Count 1: Conspiracy to Defraud the United States
Count 2: Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding
Count 3: Obstruction of and Attempt to Obstruct an Official Proceeding
Count 4: Conspiracy Against Rights
Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel took a hatchet to the indictment, saying it was fraught with untested legal theories and Department of Justice double standards. She also said that the core of Smith’s case is political naivete:
Take Mr. Trump out of the equation and consider more broadly what even the New York Times calls Mr. Smith’s “novel approach.” A politician can lie to the public, Mr. Smith concedes. Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government “function,” he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country. Dishonest politicians who act on dubious legal claims? There aren’t enough prisons to hold them all.
And here’s Alan Dershowitz highlighting what Mr. Smith omitted from the indictment, which could ironically lead to charges against him based on his “fraud” standard (via Breitbart):
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Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz says that under his own “fraud” standard, Special Counsel Jack Smith could be indicted for omitting a key portion of then-President Donald Trump’s speech in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021.
The indictment charges Trump with four counts, including “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” But in a portion recounting Trump’s speech at the “Stop the Steal” rally, Smith repeats the errors made by House Democrats in Trump’s second impeachment trial: he focuses on Trump’s use of the phrase “fight like hell,” and omits a sentence highlighted by Trump’s defense team: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Dershowitz told the Megyn Kelly Show podcast on Friday that by his own standard, Smith could be charged with fraud, because of his omission of Trump’s “peaceful” rhetoric.
“Under the indictment itself, Jack Smith could be himself indicted. He told a direct lie in this indictment. He purported to describe the speech that President Trump made on January 6th. And he left out the key words, when President Trump said, ‘I want you to demonstrate peacefully and patriotically. You know, a lie by omission, under the law, can be as serious as a lie by commission.”
The fact that Smith repeated the error of the House impeachment managers would appear deliberate, because these phrases were the crux of Trump’s Senate trial. Trump’s lawyers even played footage of Democrats using similar “fight” rhetoric, to show its common usage.
It’s a crock. We all know it is, and there’s a fourth indictment looming from Georgia. Trump and his legal team cannot ignore it, though they also want to have lengthy trials, demurring calls to have a speedy trial. For Trump, it increases his chances of re-clinching the GOP nomination in 2024, providing excellent campaign material as the man being targeted by the institutional Left. The problem is Democrats are hoping for that, too, seeing Trump as a weaker 2024 opponent. But that equation has changed with the recent developments in the emerging Biden bribery scandal.
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