Special Counsel Jack Smith: Donald Trump Is A Criminal, No Sh*t
But let him count the ways!
At long last the first volume of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report is out, after Judge Aileen Cannon’s maverick attempt to shiv it in the kidney. Fat lot of good the report coming out now does anybody, but probably it coming out sooner would not have mattered either. After all, Judge Tanya Chutkan already unsealed the government’s much-more detailed filing in Donald Trump Can Steal An Election And Let His Dumb-As-Dirt Supporters Try To Hang Mike Pence vs. No back in October, including the exhaustive appendices, and That Asshole still got re-elected anyway. Note for future elections (should there be any): Don’t stake the result upon Americans reading hundreds of pages of evidence.
And what more evidence does one need? We all saw that little turd on January 6 heaving about “fighting like hell” and telling his supporters he’d walk with them to the Capitol. We heard him wheeze about wanting 11,780 votes on that phone call to Georgia to an incredulous Brad Raffensperger. Did millions of voters nap through this? Do they have the memories of goldfish? Do they just not care? Do they approve?
It’ll also forever be an aggravating mystery why it took Attorney General Merrick Garland nearly two years to even appoint a Special Counsel, and an outrage how the Supreme Court dragged its ass for eight more months, before pronouncing Trump above the law for anything he did in the role of Holy Executive Emperor. This failure is no orphan, it has many fathers, and a mother or two.
But taxpayers paid for this report, so we might as well read it and revisit once again how Donald Trump, LOSER, knew he was a LOSING LOSER WHO LOST. A FRAUD who mounted a desperate chock-full-o-lies multi-pronged effort to steal the 2020 election anyway, one that ended in terror for legislators, violence for Capitol police officers, and death, all while he sipped a Diet Coke and shrugged “so what?” at the possibility of Mike Pence getting murdered.
It’s 174 pages of saying a whole lot of what we already knew: that there was several piñatas’ worth of evidence, more than plenty to convict that con man for his efforts to steal the 2020 election. Volume two, which we probably will never see because Trump will be king in five fucking days, is about Trump stealing and retaining our national secrets in his roach motel shitter. That volume is still under wraps for now, because the appeals to the dropping of obstruction-related charges against Trump’s Diet Coke-and-documents valet Walt Nauta and Trump’s motel manager Carlos De Oliveria are still ongoing.
There’s a new thing here: Smith is as horrified as the rest of us that the Supreme Court declared Trump more equal before the law than others, from page 122:
Before this case, no court had ever found that Presidents are immune from criminal responsibility for their official acts, and no text in the Constitution explicitly confers such criminal immunity on the President. As set forth below, prior criminal investigations by the Department of Justice, whether conducted through special prosecutors, independent counsels, or special counsels, had examined whether Presidents had violated federal criminal law through use of their official powers, and none of those investigations had regarded former Presidents as immune from criminal liability for their official acts. The Office proceeded from the same premise. [...] The Supreme Court, however, vacated the court of appeals' judgment based on its conclusion that Presidents have absolute immunity for core official conduct that Congress lacks power to regulate; at least presumptive immunity for other official presidential acts; and no immunity for unofficial conduct. [...] Department of Justice prosecutors had historically investigated presidential conduct based on the understanding that no criminal immunity would bar prosecution if the President had used his official powers to violate federal criminal law.
TL;DR: We are in post-Constitutional times, thanks to this fucked-up Supreme Court, the law is powerless to save us, that frauding con man can do whatever he wants to America now. Trying to steal the election was just an amuse-bouche.
And Smith laments in his cover letter, “While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters. I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters.” Christ, why am I about to cry?
Smith does not neglect to mention that every other fucking court other than the Supremes called bullshit on the audacious presidential immunity for “SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival” argument.
But here we are! Smith takes us through the elements of the four felonies that Trump was charged with, and makes it clear he sure as shit did those things six ways to Sunday, and that there were buckets of evidence that could have convicted him, and probably his six co-conspirators too (unnamed but easy to suss from context cues):
(1) Rudy Giuliani, (2) John Eastman, (3) Sidney Powell, (4) Jeffrey Clark, (5) Kenneth Chesebro, and (6) less obvious but probably Boris Epshteyn.
All of those treasonweasels have been indicted in some state, and they have a passel of disbarments/suspended law licenses amongst them, so at least somebody’s facing some consequences.
Count one of the four felonies Treasonboob had been charged with in DC was conspiracy to defraud the United States, on account of his repeated and widespread efforts to spread false claims about the November 2020 election while knowing they were false. How very not true did he know they were?
For starters, everybody told him so, from Vice President Mike Pence to officials in all of the seven states that he lost, to his Attorney General Bill Barr and back again. Then there’s how the numbers he claimed of dead voters and fraudulent ballots he moaned about in public were constantly changing, because he could not keep his lies straight:
“For example, in Arizona, the conspirators started with the allegation that 36,000 non-citizens voted in that state; 150 five days later, it was “beyond credulity that a few hundred thousand didn't vote”; three weeks later, “the bare minimum [was] 40 or 50,000. The reality is about 250,000”; 152 days after that, the assertion was 32,000; conspirators landed back where they started, at 36,000 — a false figure that they never verified or corroborated.”
Privately he told people that he was planning to declare victory before all ballots were counted, and told family members “it doesn't matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.” And, “in a January 3, 2021 Oval Office meeting regarding a national security matter, Mr. Trump stated in part, ‘[I]t's too late for us. We're going to give that to the next guy,’ meaning President-elect Biden.”
When a senior advisor told him that Rudy Giuliani’s claims wouldn’t hold up in court because there was no evidence, he said, “The details don’t matter.” And privately he told people that Sidney Powell’s Italian-space-laser voting-machine fraud claims were “crazy.”
And his co-conspirators lied to the would-be fake electors and then-RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, too, telling them that the fake certificates they wanted everybody to sign were For Entertainment Purposes Only and just a contingency in case Trump won his lawsuits. Some fake electors later said they never would have signed the certificates had they known that was the plan (footnote on page 22: “Nobody — nobody suggested, hey, you know what, let's just get this signed because we're gonna put pressure on ... Pence on the 6th. Cause if I had known that was the plan, I wouldn't have signed a contingent on it.”)
And so those fraudy fake certificates became the basis of two more counts: conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and the count of obstruction of/attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, all about the plan to use those fake certificates to summon Trump’s troglodyte supporters to DC and rile them up into rioting and going after Mike Pence so he couldn’t certify the election for Biden, even as Chesebro and Eastman helpfully admitted in their emails that to “send[] in 'fake' electoral votes to Pence” was “[k]ind of wild/creative,” and “‘alternative’ votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ votes” and that hey, maybe they should “keep [the plan] under wraps until Congress counts the vote on Jan. 6th.”
All of that equals unlawful means Trump and his-co-conspirators used to benefit nobody but Trump.
And don’t forget the weeks of Chesebro, Eastman, and (probably) Epshteyn nagging, haranguing, and harassing poor little Mike Pence to betray his oath of office, even as they openly admitted to each other that the plan was “not supported by the Constitution or federal law.” And then Trump demon-dialing Pence for days on end, lying to him that fraud was being found, saying the “Justice Department [was] finding major infractions,” and threatening him that “hundreds of thousands” of people would “hate his guts” and think he was “stupid,” and that Pence was “too honest.”
So that brings us to count four, conspiracy against rights, in which Trump and his co-conspirators attempted to “oppress, threaten and intimidate” people in their right to vote in an election.
To which we say, yeah, no shit. But thanks for your service, Jack Smith and team! Y’all really tried!
Smith also mentions why Trump was not charged with insurrection, in case you were wondering. Short version, he was the current president on January 6, making it legally complicated, and nobody’s prosecuted that in more than a hundred years.
So, Trump got away with everything then, then he got away with all of it some more, and Lordy knows what he’s going to get away with over the next four years. At least there’ll be no more impetus for him to even try to hide whatever crimes come next? It’ll just be all out there, with not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
Buckle up, America!
It can be done.
A president CAN get arrested after a failed coup in a democratic country.
"South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol becomes the first sitting president to be arrested in the country’s history after weeks-long standoff."
https://www.euronews.com/2025/01/15/south-koreas-president-yoon-suk-yeol-arrested-by-anti-corruption-agency-after-weeks-long-s
Memo from a Russian: it can always get worse, so never stop fighting.