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Government Corruption

Jack Smith's October Surprise

2024-10-04

[MSN] Jack Smith has failed in his quest to try Donald Trump before the 2024 election. So instead, the Special Counsel has bent ordinary procedure to get in one last shot, just weeks before voters go to the polls.
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Smith has now dropped a 165-page doorstop of a filing in federal court, on the issue of Trump's immunity from prosecution. Judge Tanya Chutkan — who suddenly claims not to care about the impending election despite her earlier efforts to expedite the case to get it in before the very same election, which got her reversed and chastised by the Supreme Court — duly complied with Smith's wishes, redacted out a few obvious names (who ever might ''Arizona Governor [Redacted P-16]'' be?), and made the rest public.
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There are two headlines here. The immediate takeaway lies in the revelations contained in Smith's oversized brief. (He asked the judge for, and received, permission to file a brief that was 180 pages long, four times the normal maximum.) We now have damning new details on Trump's effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to throw the election his way, Trump's phone use and use of Twitter as the riot unfolded, and his conversations with family members about efforts to contest his electoral loss. The story's structure is the same as we've long known, but the new details lend depth and dimension.
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The larger, if less obvious, headline is that Smith has essentially abandoned any pretense; he'll bend any rule, switch up on any practice — so long as he gets to chip away at Trump's electoral prospects. At this point, there's simply no defending Smith's conduct on any sort of principled or institutional basis. ''But we need to know this stuff before we vote!'' is a nice bumper sticker, but it's neither a response to nor an excuse for Smith's unprincipled, norm-breaking practice. (It also overlooks the fact that the Justice Department bears responsibility for taking over two and a half years to indict in the first place.)

Posted by:Fred

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