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I have been doing some research into Jack Smith, the lawyer who the Justice Department has assigned to go after President Donald Trump. It’s been fascinating. I didn’t realize that Smith went after Governor Bob McDonnell, who was a solid reform Republican governor of Virginia, whose career was suddenly ended by the Justice Department indicting him and then convicting him on what they said was bribery.
Well, it turned out that when the Supreme Court reviewed the case, they concluded that Jack Smith, the US attorney, who had indicted Governor McDonnell, was totally wrong. That what he had done, they said, was a threat to the Constitution, that he had reinterpreted the law in a way that was totally wrong. It was a unanimous decision by the court. And then as I began to dig into it, I discovered that in fact, there have been a whole range of people writing what are called amicus briefs that his friends of the court saying that this was wrong, that it was exactly the opposite of the law, and that Smith had created a totally phony case, and the judge had instructed the jurors based on this, totally phony case.
What it came down to was the following question. If a governor asked for a meeting with some of his staff, is that an official action? Or is it just a meeting? Smith said, Oh, that’s that is, by definition, an official action. Yet everybody in the meeting said the Governor did not ask them to do anything. All he asked for was a meeting to listen to a company that had an idea about health care.
Now, the difference was that what the court concluded was that if anytime an official asked for a meeting, that became an official act, then it would, in fact, totally closed down the ability to have an informed government and put every single official at risk of being indicted by a zealous prosecutor like Jack Smith.
What I was struck with — and they said, by the way — that this was a threat to our whole constitutional fabric. Well, that struck me because I had gotten run across recently, a 1940 speech by then Attorney General Jackson, in which he said that US attorneys have so much discretionary power, that they’re in grave danger of being dictators. They’re in grave danger of breaking the Constitution by their zealousness. And Jackson said — this is back way back in 1940 — that US attorneys have to be very careful and very cautious, to not use the law to go after someone because of personality or because of politics.
Well, it seems to me that Jack Smith did exactly the opposite; broke every rule that Attorney General Jackson was talking about, in the case that he lost unanimously at the Supreme Court. The vote was eight to zero, there was one vacancy, and then you look at what he’s doing here with with Trump. It’s exactly the same pattern. He’s invented three different laws, that he has reinterpreted in a way that no one ever before had reinterpreted them.
He is brought a case in a district where Biden beat Trump by 19 to one, so only one out of every 20 members would be potentially a jewel report drew for those favorable to Trump. You could hardly imagine more of a show trial in the Soviet Communist sense. So I just thought it was fascinating, and I wanted to share that information about the history of Jack Smith, the person who’s trying to destroy Donald Trump for political reasons.
