By Mike Huckabee
June 17, 2023
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On Friday, we looked at what one former assistant U.S. attorney, Will Scharf, said about the Trump “Mar-A-Lago” case, including that Stanley Woodward, attorney for Trump co-defendant Walt Nauta, had accused DOJ official Jay Bratt of suggesting Woodward’s pending judicial appointment might be looked on more favorably if he and his client cooperated against Trump. That seemed like such egregious prosecutorial misconduct that it might get the whole case tossed out.
FYI --- Here’s a little background on Bratt, who, as head of counterintelligence, was in charge of the Mar-A-Lago raid and was the official who inspected the main storage area in advance of that unnecessary show of force, telling them to put that extra lock on the door.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/18/
Of course, Scharf had more. He also noted that prosecutors violated attorney-client privilege by forcing Trump’s attorneys to testify before the grand jury about private conversations. Special counsel Jack Smith has tried to paint those conversations as part of a criminal conspiracy to break the law when they were really just Trump talking with his attorneys to clarify what they could and could not do. You know, getting ADVICE from legal counsel --- what every defendant is supposed to be able to do in private. Trump’s attorneys have argued that this is yet another example of prosecutorial misconduct.
Even just the choice of Smith by Attorney General Merrick Garland as special counsel has tainted this case, Scharf said, because Smith has shown over-the-line aggressiveness and overzealousness as a prosecutor before. And you know Garland’s choice was no accident.
That brings us to an exclusive story in PJ MEDIA by Catherine Salgado, who tells us this isn’t the first time Jack Smith has come under fire for his abuse of the attorney-client privilege.
Smith and his team have previously been sanctioned for this, in their case against former Arizona Rep. Rick Renzi, who pleaded not guilty to bribery and extortion charges, was convicted, and was later given a full presidential pardon by President Trump --- ironically, because he’d been subjected to the same sort of prosecutorial misconduct that’s being used against Trump now.
So, how did Smith and his team violate Renzi’s attorney-client privilege? By illegally wiretapping Renzi’s attorneys during privileged conversations with Renzi --- dozens of times.
According to Renzi, they were sanctioned three times. “The first is, they illegally wiretapped my attorney 41 times, they lied to the court that they did that, and they did it in order to try and pierce the attorney-client privilege using the crime-fraud exception, the same thing they us[ing] now on President Trump.”
Smith didn’t actually place the wiretaps himself, but he was responsible for overseeing the other members of his team and for holding them accountable. He did not; instead, he doubled down. Prosecutors went so far as to indict one of Renzi’s attorneys, who was later found innocent of all charges.
Once again, the DOJ is allegedly trying to use conversations protected by attorney-client privilege, this time against Trump. As Renzi explains, Smith and his hand-picked lead prosecutor David Harbach are claiming that the “former President was trying to commit a crime by asking” a certain question, even though it was “normal and proper” attorney-client privileged communication.
One of Trump’s own attorneys (until very recently), Timothy Parlatore, said Smith’s team “crossed a line” while he was testifying before the grand jury, by asking him questions that infringed on attorney-client privilege. Just as in Renzi’s case, Smith’s team was “not acting appropriately,” Parlatore said, “and made several attempts to pierce privilege and, in my opinion, made several significant misstatements to the [grand] jury, which I believe constitutes prosecutorial misconduct.”
Renzi told Salgado that “the question Trump asked [his attorneys] is being wrongly used against him. These guys have used it, framed it, in order to pierce the attorney-client privilege veil, just as they tried to do in my case.” Salgado concluded her report with a teaser that promised “more exclusive and shocking accusations of prosecutorial misconduct from Smith.”
In a story from Tuesday, Salgado has more. “Based on a 2019 complaint filed on Renzi’s behalf by respected legal firm Mayer Brown, evidence was found of prosecutorial misconduct, including improper media leaks, illegal wiretaps, concealment of exculpatory evidence, and introduction of false testimony before and during Renzi’s trial. This misconduct involved both the FBI and DOJ, with prosecutors under the supervision of none other than Jack Smith. David Harbach was among those handling the prosecution of Renzi.”
Smith’s tactics in his prosecution of President Trump seem to very much echo the Renzi case. Renzi has no illusions talking about Smith now: “Jack Smith gets up, wraps himself in the [U.S.] flag as an independent, but he’s been clearly biased against Republicans for years. He’s very, very dangerous.”
Another strategy used by Smith and Harbach: choosing the jury based on political beliefs. For Renzi’s trial, they asked members of the jury pool to raise their hands if they were pro-life or in favor of pregnancy centers. Those who raised their hands were not selected for the jury. That might have had something to do with Ranzi being a vocally pro-life congressman who is also the father of 12 children. Similarly, knowing that pro-life jurors are likely to support Trump, Smith and Harbach could easily use the same technique to weed them out of Trump’s jury pool.
CNN has actually looked with favor on stacking Trump’s jury politically against him, saying jurors should be chosen for their “worldviews” and “where [they] get their news.”
So we know what this is: a political prosecution --- more accurately, persecution --- of a former President and current leading candidate for President, run by the kind of attorney who shouldn’t even be allowed to practice law.
Chris Farrell, director of investigations and research of Judicial Watch, discussed the Presidential Records Act with Dan Ball on the “Real America” podcast saying the President has an “absolute, unreviewable authority” to decide what will be his personal records. And the National Archives are “specifically prohibited” from getting involved in deciding what’s personal and what’s a presidential record. This ruling, from DC District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an Obama appointee, came out of the now-famous Bill Clinton “sock drawer” case, which, ironically, was brought, and lost, by Judicial Watch. It has stood unchallenged for 12 years.
“Bill Clinton gets a pass, he gets to walk and do whatever he damn well pleases; Donald Trump gets a phonied-up, way-out-of-the-ballpark Espionage Act claim brought against him.”
Some legal analysts are saying Clinton’s tapes of interviews and conversations are not the same as defense-related materials, but applied to the Espionage Act, this is a specious argument until we know the nature of those materials and if Trump thought his possession of them posed any danger to national security.
Farrell notes that the indictment drawn up by Jack Smith against President Trump contains not even one mention of the Presidential Records Act. If Smith mentions it, that opens the door to the “Clinton sock drawer” decision.
Judicial Watch is suing to find out who is on Smith’s prosecution team, because Smith won’t say. But they’re not supposed to be acting as a secret cabal. Is this largely the same cast of characters, the same political hacks who faked the Russia Hoax against Trump and later worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team? We’ll be surprised if it’s not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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RELATED: And now for the flip side. Jeff Charles at REDSTATE wonders if the FBI ever really investigated the Biden bribery scandal at all.
FOX NEWS’ Harris Faulkner interviewed Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton about suing to obtain information about the 1,850 boxes of documents held at the Penn Biden Center. They also want a copy of the secret deal the university has with Joe Biden to keep the American people from seeing them. Fitton says Biden’s deal was structured in such a way that we won’t see them until “two years after he leaves politics.”
Finally, for your weekend reading (I won’t say “reading pleasure” because it’ll make you mad), here’s Alan Dershowitz on the problem Trump is having even HIRING top attorneys. We’ve talked before about the “65 Project,” a detestable group that tries to intimidate lawyers out of representing Trump. Thoroughly disgusting and un-American.
https://www.zerohedge.com/
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