Thank you for your long and thoroughly concise explanation of the kangaroo Court indictments trying to razzle dazzle the American voters into supporting the eggplant’s errr …..excuse me the Biden re-election parade. Kind of novel using the DC hit squad rigged judicial attack dogs and Smith as Master of ceremonies to rig an election in 2024. By my sister in response to This!! 👇

A Most Excellent Posting!

I would like to take a moment today to discuss, for those interested, the most recent federal indictment of former President Donald Trump. Whether you support Trump or not, you should be interested in these latest charges. In my discussions with friends and acquaintances, I have noticed that not many understand what is actually going on, so I’d like to present the issue in the simplest possible terms here. Let me warn you in advance that even stated in the simplest possible terms, this is a long post. So if you have the attention span of a chipmunk on LSD, or you only care if the government is going to make the rest of us pay off your student loans, you may want to skip this one. Some of the big words we used to learn in a standard high school education would probably hurt your head anyway.

First, please be aware that this, and another indictment against Trump were brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate and if indicated, indict Donald Trump on criminal violations of federal law. The most important thing to know, right at the start, is that an "indictment" is merely a statement of alleged charges from the prosecution. It is not evidence, nor does it establish criminal behavior. That is decided in the course of a trial, usually by a jury, but sometimes by a judge alone. The current charges against Trump will be decided by two separate juries. For now, one will be in Florida, and the other in Washington, DC, but the second trial’s location may well be changed to another place. More on that later.

The second thing to know is that Jack Smith is by no means a public servant interested in justice or fairness. His background makes it clear that he is a partisan Democrat activist, with a record of making ridiculous charges that he cannot prove in court, and when he does get a conviction in a political case, a history of being overturned by appellate courts. For example, in 2014 Smith prosecuted former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell on charges of corruption while in office, forever ruining McDonnell’s political career. But in 2016, in a highly unusual unanimous decision, the United States Supreme Court overturned the conviction. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a scathing ruling against the prosecution by Smith, calling it one of the worst cases of government overreach in memory. But the damage by then was already done to McDonnell.

As I have mentioned, Smith is prosecuting two separate cases against Trump. The earlier of the two is colloquially referred to as the "Classified Documents Case" and the most recent is known as the "January 6th Case". The two cases are completely separate and the outcome of one is completely independent of the other. Smith is seeking a trial in both cases before the 2024 election, for the obvious purpose of making sure that Donald Trump is too busy defending himself in court to campaign effectively, and that he has to deplete his financial resources on a legal fight that could be used for campaign expenses instead. Even a child can see that Smith has received his marching orders to torpedo Trump’s run for the presidency from his boss, Merrick Garland, who has in turn received his orders from Joe Biden. Such abuse of federal prosecutions to influence a political outcome, in this case a federal election, is known as "Lawfare", or political warfare waged using th law.

But all is not well in Smith’s world right now. First, he is up against Department of Justice Rule 9-85.500 that prohibits the Department from bringing or pursuing an action close to an election that could influence the contest’s outcome. That has generally been interpreted as not allowing a case to be brought or pursued within six months of an election. So Smith, after waiting two and a half years, has decided that he has to bring both cases right now, and desperately wanted a trial date by the end of 2023 for his first at-bat against Trump. He didn’t get what he wanted on the Classified Documents Case, which trial is now scheduled for May of 2024, but will likely not be tried until after the election with the expected continuances that are sure to be granted. This scheduling is likely what prompted him to bring the January 6th Case in such a hurried fashion. He desperately needs a trial to happen before the election to get what he has been ordered to achieve. This is the ruination of Donald Trump’s run for President, regardless of whether Smith gets a conviction that will stick or not.

I don’t know about you, but my understanding of the purpose of our criminal justice system is to secure the conviction and punishment of wrongdoers, not to influence elections. If we look at the two cases against Donald Trump as outlined in the indictments, there may in fact be some merit to some of the charges in the Classified Documents Case. A detailed analysis of that case would take pages and make one’s eyes glaze over reading the ins and outs of obscure federal statutes that no one has been successfully prosecuted under since Moby was a minnow. Suffice it to say that that case has now begun and is in the hands of a judge in Florida who has a record of fair and impartial treatment. So time and a trial, probably after the 2024 election, will tell. But our boy Jack can’t be too happy about that one.

One does not have to be a Trump supporter (and in fact he is not my preferred candidate) to see the abuse of the federal law enforcement process or to see what Jack Smith has in mind for the so-called January 6th Case. He has charged Trump with attempting to obstruct and conspiring with others to obstruct an official proceeding of the federal government, and attempting to defraud and conspiring with others to defraud the U.S. government. For good measure, he has thrown in a charge that Trump attempted to deprive citizens of their rights under the 14th Amendment, using a law from the post-Civil War era designed to punish southern whites who tried to keep free blacks from voting, often with violence. These alleged offenses are shocking, and according to multiple renowned legal scholars, would be even more shocking if Smith could actually prove even one of them in a fair trial. But a fair trial is the last thing on Smith’s mind. The attempt by Smith to even bring the January 6th Case is the first time in our nation’s history that the government has tried to criminalize political differences of opinion, to construe listening to the advice of one’s attorneys as a conspiracy, or to punish constitutionally protected speech.

Smith has brought the January 6th Case in the Washington, DC Federal District Court, where he knows that 92% of the people who would be called for jury duty voted against Trump in the last election, and where a similar percentage say they are Democrats. He also knows that the trial judges in this district are virulently anti-Trump. By luck of the draw, one of the worst and least impartial of these was selected for his trial. Tanya Chutkan, who has previously shown an animus toward Trump, his legal defenses, and his supporters caught the case. Smith was able to get this trial set for his dream jurisdiction in DC because that is where the charged behavior is alleged to have occurred. But the federal rules do not require that the trial remain in this court, nor with this judge. Trump can request the trial be moved on the basis that he cannot get a fair trial there, and he can ask the judge to recuse herself. Unfortunately for Trump, those decisions initially rest with Judge Chutkan, who is unlikely to rule in his favor on either request. Trump can appeal both, but the DC Circuit Court of Appeals also has a history of being extremely liberal and likely to support Chutkan’s decision. Trump may have to attempt to have his requests ruled on by the U.S. Supreme Court, something they may not agree to do prior to trial. So in laymen’s terms, Trump will likely be playing to a tough crowd, in front of a tough judge. This is an ideal situation for Smith’s case.

So what exactly is it that Smith is claiming Trump did that was a crime? The charges center around Trump’s claims, made after the 2020 election, but before the results were certified by Congress on January 6, 2021, that the election was "stolen". Trump made many public statements to this effect, and suggested that his supporters meet in Washington DC on January 6th to protest the certification of the election. Trump hoped to raise enough questions about the validity of vote handling and counting, and election rules changed without proper authority in the wake of Covid in some states to have Congress delay the official certification, and he hoped to have those state legislatures take another look about whether their elections were conducted according to law.

What you need to understand about this, in case you slept through your 8th Grade Government class is that most of these last minute changes were authorized by state Governors or Secretaries of State, but the Constitution says that the state legislatures are responsible for setting the rules for each state’s presidential election, which most did not do. If Trump had been successful in his challenges, the election might have been thrown into the U.S. House of Representatives, where Trump might have been declared the winner. As we all know by now, due to the January 6th riot, where about 1 percent of those in attendance that day stormed the Capitol, Trump’s objections were not heard or acted upon.

Although all of this was completely legal for Trump to try, and is laid out in the Constitution and court decisions as such, in Jack Smith’s world, it is criminal obstruction of a proceeding of the federal government. And, since Trump consulted several of his lawyers about the legality of raising such objections, Smith is charging that they all conspired to obstruct the certification of the election. Never mind that such objections have been raised by the losing side since the Tilden-Hayes Election of 1876 and never prosecuted (since they aren’t crimes), Smith has magically bent the law to serve his purposes. Funny how that works, maybe he used mirrors.

So what’s next on Smith’s legal hit parade? Well for those who don’t know, and that seems to be the majority of Americans these days, our presidential elections are not decided by a popular national vote. Rather they are decided by the Electoral College. Rather than one national election, we actually have one in each state, and we are voting for "Electors" who then go to a meeting of the Electoral College to cast their votes for President and Vice President. There is usually a Democrat slate of Electors and a Republican slate of Electors ready to go, depending on who gets the most votes in that state’s election. There are good reasons for the existence of the Electoral College that are beyond the scope of this post. After the Electoral College meets, the votes are provided to the Vice President of the United States to open and officially count. In 2021, that happened on January 6th, with then-VP Mike Pence officiating. This procedure was laid out, at the time, in the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which was designed to fix some of the problems that arose from the hotly contested election of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency in 1886. It may interest you to know that Hayes, for the rest of his presidency and life was referred to by his detractors as "His Fraudulency" as a reference to an election many did not think he actually won. Joe Biden has similarly been called "His Fraudulency the Second" based on similar concerns about the 2020 election. However, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 caused as many problems as it fixed.

In a nutshell, the drafters of that law did not specify whether the role of the VP was to simply open and count the electoral votes in a purely ceremonial role, or whether he could decide not to count certain state slates of electors until hearing from a contested state’s legislature about which electors to count. This is normally not an issue, because by the time the irrelevant VP gets his or her grubby little fingers on the votes, the election is pretty well settled. Opening and counting the 50 states’ electoral votes in an uncontested election is something we might even be able to trust our own village idiot VP Kamala Harris to perform correctly on a good day, and certainly within the capabilities of the very competent Mike Pence. But there was a legal difference of opinion on what exactly the VP’s role was in this process. President Trump, advised by constitutional attorney John Eastman and others, believed Pence had the discretion to pause the count until the legislatures could weigh in on possibly illegally made changes to their election laws, such as extending the dates for voting. Pence felt that he did not have that authority, and that all he was empowered to do was open and count the votes that he had on hand, Either man could have been right. The issue was so confusing that Congress, in 2022, changed the law to reflect Pence’s position. Had this been as clear cut as some now claim in 2020, there would have been no need for Congress to clarify the law in 2022.

So Trump attempted to persuade Mike Pence that his interpretation of the 1877 law was correct, based on the advice of his legal counsel. To be fair, many of Trump’s appointed officials tried to persuade Trump that he was wrong, and that Pence was right, but Trump decided not to listen to them but rather to listen to lawyers he was paying to advise him. They may have simply told Trump what he wanted to hear, but it still boiled down to a difference of opinion. In preparation for Pence "pausing" the count, Trump supporters prepared an alternate slate of electors for each contested state. These were the people who would have likely been sent to vote at the electoral college had that state’s election been ruled unlawful by that state’s legislature. Oddly enough, the Democrats have done this exact same thing in each presidential election they were in fear of losing since 1960, the only time in which it worked, with Hawaii’s slate of electors. Nobody ever charged them with a crime. Trump by the way calls these "alternate electors" while Smith refers to them as "fraudulent electors". Words mean things, especially in criminal law.

So have your eyes glazed over yet? Hell, I’m a hardcore political and history junkie, and I can’t even make this any simpler than I just did. The short version is that Jack Smith is saying that the preparation of alternate slates of electors was masterminded by Trump in concert with his lawyers, and was therefore a conspiracy to defraud the government. As though anyone thought that the alternate slates were the real electors that Pence should have counted on January 6th and that Trump was trying to trick him. That was never the case. To his personal credit, Mike Pence seems to be a man of integrity, and on January 6th, stuck to his guns about his interpretation of the law as it existed at the time. That does not mean it was a crime for Trump to try to change his mind.

Also, it is a required element of a fraud conviction to prove that the defendant had intent to defraud, that is to say that he knew that what he was saying to support his con game was false at the time he said it. Smith thinks he can get into Trump’s head and divine what he was thinking when he challenged the election results. This is a practical impossibility unless he can find some document Trump wrote, or a recording he made that said, “Yeah, I know my challenges to the 2020 election are all bullshit, but I’m going to say it anyway.” Smith has nothing of the sort. If he did, he would have put it in his indictment. And, after years of watching Donald Trump in action, do you really think he believes he has ever lost anything or that anything was ever his fault? That idea is simply inconsistent with his narcissistic personality. Instead, Smith thinks that simply showing that some very smart people told him he was wrong about the election is sufficient. It is not, legally speaking. Smith must show proof that Trump believed that he had lost fair and square and persisted anyway, which Smith really can’t do.

Finally, Smith is charging that Trump’s attempts to exhaust every remedy he had to contest an election he thought, rightly or wrongly that he won, was an attempt to disenfranchise people who didn’t vote for him. To use a sports analogy, this is like charging a football coach with cheating who calls for a time-out to argue with the referees about whether the other side actually scored the game-winning touchdown, or if they stepped out of bounds just before crossing the goal line. You may well disagree with that coach, but he ain’t cheating. He is just making use of the rules. Had Trump simply refused to leave the White House when his time was up at noon on January 20th, 2021 and turn over power to Joe Biden, then Smith might well have a case for disenfranchisement, but Trump didn’t do that.

We also have this pesky rule book called the Constitution. That document says that even Donald Trump gets to express his opinion, even when he is wrong, and to be a total asshole while stating it. That document also says that he has the right to seek redress of grievances from the government within the rules, and we all know Trump has never been shy about letting us know when he feels aggrieved. Neither of these things is illegal, nor is it a criminal conspiracy to, when presented with conflicting advice from various lawyers, make a choice as to which ones you believe.

It is widely held by constitutional legal scholars that Jack Smith’s charges in the January 6th Case will have the life expectancy of a beer fart in a tornado once they reach the Supreme Court of the United States, where the big boys and girls rule on what the Constitution really says. So why is he filing such charges at all? For the same reason that he filed his bogus charges against Bob McDonnell. His objective is the political destruction of his target, whether or not the process is fair or just. In fact, the process is the punishment. He knows that he could stand in front of a Washington, DC jury and Judge Chutkan and simply read from the phone book as evidence and get a conviction of Trump in that venue. He also knows that the DC Circuit Court of Appeals would likely sustain that conviction. While Trump would almost certainly remain free on bond pending appeal to SCOTUS, Smith knows that the publicity, the trial, and the expense would effectively cost Trump the election and keep Smith’s boss, Joe Biden in power, unless dementia gets to Biden first. What if, after conviction, one of the conditions of Trump’s bond is that he can’t leave the state? How would Trump campaign like this? A condition like that would be the stuff of Jack Smith’s wet dreams. This is why he is rushing this second case to trial before the election. It does him no good if it is held afterward.

Trump has a chance to avoid this, but it is a bit of a long shot. His legal team, if they strike out on moving the trial or having the assigned judge recused, can file what is known as an "interlocutory appeal". That simply means an appeal to a higher court before the original trial is over. Appellate courts, and especially the Supreme Court really do not like to intervene until after a case has been adjudicated but given the constitutional and national implications of this case, they may choose to. If Trump can get this case moved to a more politically balanced venue, he could possibly get a fair trial simply on the merits of the case.

Some readers who do not care for Donald Trump will possibly note that I have described certain facts of the pending case in a manner most favorable to the former President. This is true, and by design. The charges against Trump all hinge on little used and obscure federal statutes, and it is not at all clear that they apply to Trump’s actions or were even intended to address his behavior. There is a controlling principle in law known as the "Rule of Lenity", also known as the "Rule of Strict Construction" that states that when a statute is ambiguous, its meaning MUST be construed in the manner most favorable to the defendant, and against the government. So I’m just looking at the law in a way that a fair court is required to. Just don’t confuse that with the way Judge Chutkan or a DC jury will look at the law. If there is any real justice, this case will be moved to another place and handed to another judge.

As I’ve stated, Donald Trump is not my preferred candidate for the next Republican President of the United States. I believe that the GOP could run an over-ripe eggplant in 2024 and beat Joe Biden in a fair election. Cognitively speaking, that might in fact be a fair matchup. Reasonable people can certainly disagree with me on this, but I think that Donald Trump has so much baggage, fair and unfair, that he is about the only Republican candidate who could lose to our current Idiot-In-Chief in the next election. So if Jack Smith’s bogus charges take Trump out, why would I care? More importantly, if you have read this far (and thank you if you have), why should you care?

It’s simple. There are certain behaviors that a functional constitutional republic simply does not engage in. Again, for those sleeping beauties who slumbered through 8th grade Government while I was awake taking notes for you, that is the form of government we are supposed to have here in America, where everyone working for the government is restrained in the use of its power by the Constitution. We do NOT live in a "democracy" in which an unrestrained majority rules or where criminal penalties are a matter of popularity. Either we protect everyone’s rights, or none of ours are safe.

The use of taxpayer money and the awesome might of the federal government to persecute and damage a political opponent is supposed to be reserved for some of the Third World dumps that I have lived in, often referred to as Banana Republics. Trust me, you don’t want to live in a country where the government gets away with this sort of thing, even less than you may want to live in a country run by Donald Trump for 48 months, if you are not a Trump supporter. Once we as a nation allow that line to be crossed we can never go back. We are then just another empire in decline, rather than what Ronald Reagan referred to in 1970 as “the shining city on the hill.”

The trial that Jack Smith wants to put on before the election is something that back in the days of the old USSR, we would have called a "show trial" in front of a kangaroo court. It should surprise no one that the slimy Smith is being portrayed by the leftist media as a hero of law and order for pursuing a prosecution that wouldn’t pass muster in traffic court. It is distinctly un-American, and if it works, may well signal the end of the Republic as we know it. You, as the American voter should decide through the political process and an election what you think of Donald Trump’s behavior following the 2020 election. Either you hated it, or you thought he was right to complain about it.

You may think Trump is the greatest thing since sliced bread, or you may have him pegged as the Anti-Christ. Or like me, you simply might think there are better Republican candidates out there. Or you might prefer the current President, who on a good day can’t count his testicles and get the same number twice, but gives away a lot of free stuff. Those are your decisions and should be left to you as voters at the ballot box, rather than in the hands of a political hit man masquerading as a federal prosecutor who is looking to rig the next election. Tom Crawford

Find Tom at:
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