By Mike Huckabee
October 4, 2024
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Right now, just one month away from Election Day 2024, with ballots going out and early voting already taking place in some states, you’re witnessing the most blatant attempt by the legal system to interfere with an election that you may ever see.
And no one is even surprised. In fact, they expected it. If Trump manages to get elected anyway, the re-tweaked indictment released by U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan in DC will also be used, at least if Congress is retaken by Democrats, to impeach him on Day One. Get ready for lawfare as this country has never experienced before, all in the name of “protecting our democracy” from a duly-elected President. Just as the Russia Hoax was the Democrats’ “insurance policy” against Trump in his first term, they plan to use this report the same way if he’s elected to a second.
A little backstory: “Special Counsel” Jack Smith --- we use quotation marks around that title because this Merrick Garland appointee never received Senate confirmation as is constitutionally required --- had to make changes to his original report on Trump’s alleged role in the January 6 riot in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling this summer on presidential immunity for official acts, and he submitted it to Judge Chutkan five weeks ago. The new indictment, as reported by the AP, kept the same criminal charges but “narrowed” the specific allegations against Trump.
Judge Chutkan acknowledged in a hearing a week later that the case would probably not go to trial until well after the election and maybe even after the start of the new administration next year.
But that hasn’t stopped Chutkan from allowing Smith’s 165-page report to be unsealed. Note that this is well within 60 days of an election, the time when actions such as this are traditionally construed as election interference and avoided for that reason. (That’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but certainly the general policy, an unwritten rule.) So, this ruling is drastic. But for Smith and Chutkan, election interference isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.
Chutkan had already shown herself as insufferably biased against Trump and his supporters in some of her rulings against January 6 defendants, which contained prejudicial statements. Some of these are highlighted in Julie Kelly’s highly recommended 2022 book, JANUARY 6, and we’ve discussed them here. So Chutkan’s bias has been no secret --- Trump’s legal team tried early on to get her to recuse herself from his case, but she wouldn’t --- and her decision to unseal the report right before the election is exactly what one would expect a viciously anti-Trump judge to do.
Before she ruled to unseal it, Trump’s attorneys took a stab at getting her to keep it under seal until after the election, surely knowing their effort was an exercise in futility. In a filing the day before, they said Smith’s insistence on pushing witness testimony into the public’s view ahead of the election is “politically motivated.”
“The Office wants their politically motivated manifesto to be public, contrary to the Justice Manual and longstanding DOJ norms in cases not involving President Trump, in the final weeks of the 2024 Presidential election while early voting has already begun throughout the United States.”
And this isn’t just about the election, but also Trump’s right to a fair trial. “The Office believes Trump’s Constitutional rights to impartial jurors and fair proceedings --- to say nothing of witness privacy and even safety --- all take a back seat to the Office’s political goals.” This would be “an unprecedented filing, with no legal basis, which just so happens to retread false allegations against the leading candidate for the Presidency during early voting in the 2024 election.”
And, of course, this argument cut no ice with Judge Chutkan, who appears to share Smith’s political goals.
Tristan Justice at THE FEDERALIST describes the report as “an anonymously sourced manifesto compiled to warrant deep state investigations into former President Donald Trump with the ultimate aim of tossing him out of the White House.” He called it “Smith’s final Hail Mary to convince Americans of Trump’s guilt --- even as voters are already turning in ballots.”
And if Trump wins? “Democrats are only planning to escalate their legal crusade against Trump after the election,” Justice writes, pointing out that they’ve got three criminal cases in the works: this one in DC, the one in Georgia (which is looking increasingly shaky after the prosecutorial corruption has been exposed), and the one in Manhattan (where Trump was clearly railroaded and a jury has already voted to convict).
As law professor and legal analyst Jonathan Turley posted on X: “Judge Chutkan, as expected, has ordered the release of the Smith filing weeks before the election. Smith fought unsuccessfully to try Trump before the election but has now been allowed to release this scathing report. Smith was clearly eager to get this out before the public despite Justice Department policies that encourage prosecutors to avoid acts that would be viewed as trying to influence an election.”
President Trump called out Judge Chutkan, posting on Truth Social: “For 60 days prior to an election, the Department of Justice is supposed to do absolutely nothing that would taint or interfere with a case. They disobeyed their own rule in favor of complete and total election interference.”
(Ironically, one of Smith’s accusations against Trump is “election interference,” which I guess is only a federal crime when Trump allegedly does it.)
FOX NEWS legal analyst Gregg Jarrett said Smith was trying to have a “damning trial-without-a-trial” because he couldn’t get a real trial before the election. This “sure looks like blatant election interference,” he said. “There’s no good reason to make it public,” he said, since “there isn’t even a trial date.”
Trump’s attorneys are not required to respond to any allegations in the report until three weeks after the election, and that’s fine with them; they don’t want to even dignify it with a response. Jarrett describes much of what’s in it as “gratuitous,” adding that it “reads like bad detective fiction.” (We would add that this description sounds a lot like what was in the Steele Dossier, and that comparison can certainly be made.) The idea was to get the media to pick up on “provocative details,” and, sure enough, that’s what they did.
“A lot of it is irrelevant and inadmissible,” he said on FOX & FRIENDS, referring to protected conversations that Trump had with his own advisers. In the filing, Smith says that nothing is protected, but later on, he acknowledges that some of it is but that he can still “rebut the presumption of [Trump’s] immunity.”
The basic accusations against Trump haven’t changed, but the details have been expanded and sensationalized. Smith assumes the worst motives on Trump’s part --- his political enemies always do, we’ve noticed --- but it’s hard to make the case that he was deliberately being dishonest when he truly believed he had been cheated. (Smith doesn’t have to make the case for his dishonesty with this judge, though; she already believes the worst about Trump.)
Jarrett laughed that Smith was “trying to circumvent the immunity decision here, and that’s what this motion [to unseal the report] is all about.”
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6362794080112
Even a CBS NEWS legal contributor, Rebecca Roiphe, says the argument that releasing the report breaches Trump’s right to a fair trial is “not a far-fetched” one. That’s because of the “unusual” level of detail in it. “There’s a level of detail that one doesn’t normally see in motion filings.”
She also noted that Smith had previously said that to ensure justice, he would redact quotations from “sensitive materials” --- meaning, we would assume, those that might be from protected conversations --- but that he reversed himself on that. So much for ensuring justice.
FOX NEWS legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy went further, accusing Smith of tainting the jury pool by releasing this brief. He said most judges would have reacted differently.
“In most cases,” he said, “a judge would be very concerned that evidence not be broadcast in public without the usual due process cautions that go on in a trial that the defendant be presumed innocent, the fact that allegations are not evidence of anything. The point of releasing this now can only be to affect the election. There is no legal need for it.”
But it didn’t matter to this judge that “the idea was to get the evidence out in as spectacular a way as possible” to “hopefully get Trump ‘convicted’ in the run-up to the election.”
McCarthy contrasts the treatment of Trump with the deference that was given to President Biden and son Hunter before the 2020 election. In that case, they clearly knew they had strong evidence of repeated lawbreaking but hid it to tip the election outcome. So this isn’t the first time the legal system has put its giant thumb on the scale in favor of Democrats.
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