By Mike Huckabee
January 2, 2024
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When last we saw the news about Special Counsel Jack Smith --- and I hope you didn’t spend much of your Christmas week thinking about HIM --- Santa had disappointed him badly by giving him an order from the Supreme Court declining to rule on Trump’s presidential immunity without letting the DC Circuit Court rule first, as they would normally do for any other person besides you-know-who.
In his all-out effort to railroad President Trump before the ‘24 election, Smith thought it was fine to cut out a step in the process. In the interest of time, you know. And besides, this is Trump, who doesn’t deserve the rights of...well, any other American citizen you can point to. We’ve got to stop Trump from becoming President again because he’s the reincarnation of HITLER! Why, if he became President again, he would literally declare himself dictator, the way he did last time. Oh, wait, he did nothing like that. Still, he might try to get other candidates’ names taken off the ballot! No, come to think of it, that’s the Democrats. Never mind.
“Is this [Supreme Court ruling] going to upset the plans of Jack Smith?” law professor Jonathan Turley asked earlier this month. “Yeah!”
So let’s see how Smith is doing, coming into the New Year. Well, in his zeal, he appears not to have taken any time away from his work saving “our democracy.” In the hours before 2023 became 2024, he made an appellate filing saying that Trump is “a danger to the American republic.” As reported in the NEW YORK SUN, “The special counsel reckons that the ‘Founders did not intend and would never have countenanced’ the expansive vision of presidential immunity propounded by Mr. Trump.’
“Rising to high rhetorical dudgeon, Mr. Smith declares that Mr. Trump’s invocation of the protections of the office he once held ‘threatens the democratic and constitutional foundation of our Republic.’” (At least a Democrat finally remembered we’re a republic, not a democracy.)
Smith’s brief reprises his core allegation that Mr. Trump “conspired to use knowingly false claims of election fraud with the goal of overturning the legitimate results” of the last election and “disenfranchising millions of voters.”
While Mr. Smith allows that presidents are shielded from civil liability for their official conduct, he maintains that “any burdens of post Presidency criminal liability have minimal impact on the functions of an incumbent and are outweighed by the paramount public interest in upholding the rule of law through federal prosecution.”
He also argues that the double jeopardy argument doesn’t apply simply because Trump was acquitted of insurrection in his impeachment, saying Trump can still be prosecuted for the underlying acts. (Curiously, Smith didn’t charge Trump with insurrection while charging him with CONSPIRACY to commit insurrection.)
Smith brought up a point made by one of President Clinton’s attorneys, Nicole Seligman, during Clinton’s Senate impeachment trial, who argued that if the Senate acquitted the President (they did, of course), he could still be prosecuted in criminal court, like any other citizen, after his presidency was over.
Smith cited the “rigorous standards to prove criminal offenses and evidentiary limitations that would come into play” with the prosecution of a President. Now, that’s one of those statements that should come with its own laugh track. By now we’ve all seen the “rigorous standards” this special counsel holds himself to.
Here’s the full story at the NEW YORK SUN…
Now let’s move to the current status of state-by-state efforts to simply have President Trump dropped from primary ballots. Judge Andrew Napolitano, speaking on NEWSMAX on New Year’s morning, said the Supreme Court should strike down “unanimously” these states’ attempts to block him in this way. A party-line vote will be seen as --- what else? --- political, and Chief Justice Roberts can’t let the court be seen as acting on this out of partisanship.
“There’s a lot of people who criticized the Chief Justice John Roberts,” he said, “but one thing you cannot criticize him for is his ability to amass a majority on the Court. He said that what’s going on inside Roberts’ head right now is this: “How can this be resolved with unanimity because the Court cannot be made to look political.”
He fears that a split decision could be so divisive that it could cause one of those “black swan” events, similar in power to COVID and the BLM riots, for disrupting the ‘24 election. “The Court can’t take sides in a political dispute,” he said. The Court has the final word on what the Constitution means, and that final word needs to be articulated with unanimity, not an easy task when you have six conservatives and three liberals.” He’s hoping the liberals can rule with the majority, that they will see the dangers of taking the right to vote out of Americans’ hands under the guise of a so-called “insurrection” that wasn’t one.
Napolitano is hopeful, saying that “something happens when you have a lifetime job, something divorces you from the political process and causes you to focus on just the meaning and values and history of what you’re interpreting, in this case the 14th Amendment.” Well, let’s pray he’s right, as university professors have lifetime tenure and it doesn’t seem to be helping there.
You can imagine what Napolitano had to say about Shenna Bellows, the Democrat secretary of state in Maine who singlehandedly took Trump off the ballot in that state. “She’s in the process of printing ballots almost literally as we speak,” he said, sometime in the next few weeks. She may very well have thought that she could catch the Republicans flatfooted and print the ballots without his name on [them] before there’s even time for an appeal. That would be a gross abuse of her office.”
The Supreme Court has to weigh in in Maine, he said, because the “Constitution has to mean the same thing in all states of the Union,” not 51 different things.
“It’s a crazy situation that they have in Maine,” he said, “whereby a single unelected official can decide who gets on the ballot and who doesn’t --- without charges, without a trial, without a jury, without any conviction, without any finding of fault on the part of Donald Trump.”
All in the name of protecting “our democracy.”
https://www.newsmax.com/
Here’s some background on Bellows. Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung sums it up well: “The Maine secretary of state is a former ACLU attorney” (correction: director of the state ACLU, but not an attorney), “a virulent leftist and a hyper-partisan Biden-supporting Democrat who has decided to interfere in the presidential election on behalf of Crooked Joe Biden. We are witnessing, in real time, the attempted theft of an election and the disenfranchisement of the American voter.”
https://dailycaller.com/2023/
HUMOR BREAK! Here’s the BABYLON BEE’s take on the above observation. Democrats are NOT stealing the election in secret! They’e doing it right out in the open, so there!
Even the legal analyst at CNN, Elie Honig, cast shade on Bellows’ decision to take Trump’s name off the primary ballot in Maine. Sure, the Constitution is clear that if you “engage in insurrection, and you’re out,” he said. The complicated part is “who gets to decide, and by what process.”
He explained that “if you look at the hearing, and she details this in the ruling, they heard from one fact witness, a law professor. She based her ruling on a lot of documents, but also YouTube clips, news reports, things that would never pass the bar in normal court. She’s not a lawyer, by the way. It’s a smartly written decision, clearly consulted with lawyers, but this is an unelected– she’s chosen by the state legislature. Chosen, elected by the legislature, but not democratically elected.”
“Clearly consulted with lawyers.” Wouldn’t it be fun to know if she consulted with congressional attorneys for the J6 Kangaroo Kommittee? After all, that’s the kind of “evidence” they were using in their staged and scripted “hearings.”
Last week on Sean Hannity’s show, former Hawaii congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard had similar words for Bellows, sounding the alarm about Democrats who “will stop at nothing” to maintain power. And she’s right --- when have they ever backed down?
And, importantly, it’s not just Democrats. (Please heed this warning when considering other GOP candidates.) Gabbard noted that “efforts to sideline Trump extend beyond the Democratic Party, with some Republicans ‘threatened by’ his departure from ‘their establishment ways.’” She didn’t name names, but I’m sure you can think of a few. Some of them are running for President.
From her interview with Pete Hegseth:
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