Democrats must answer for Jack Smith’s politically charged
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
Jack Smith has finally slunk off the stage, and the Democrats are already acting like the whole thing was just a misunderstanding. But the special counsel’s final report was no mere bureaucratic document. It was a confession.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
The Senate Judiciary Committee last week dropped evidence that Biden-ers special counsel Jack Smith savagely abused prosecutorial powers for purely political purposes — an outrage Democrats as of now seem sure to repeat when next they run the Executive Branch.
The Biden Justice Department in 2022 tasked Smith with creating a federal case against then-ex-President Donald Trump to hobble (or better still prevent) his third White House run. Now we know that Smith, in his Capt.
Ahab pursuit of Trump, went after complete innocents — spying on thousands of average Americans , obtaining their home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures. Their crime? Donating to Trump, in some cases as little as $1.
Smith also obtained emails of dozens of reporters at major media outlets — targets who fell across the partisan spectrum, by the way, in case left-leaning journos thought their political allegiances might spare them.
What was their crime? Daring to be in touch with Trump White House officials. All this comes atop Smith’s already-revealed spying on text messages between Trump officials and 44 lawmakers from October 2020 to Jan. 20, 2021.
Again: The victimized legislators come from both parties. And the seizure of their texts seems a clear violation of Article I’s “Speech and Debate” clause, which protects members of Congress from civil and criminal prosecution over their official activity.
Plus, Smith spied on the whereabouts of 10 Republican lawmakers in the days before and after Jan. 6 using phone geolocation —surveillance ruled clearly unconstitutional in a landmark 2018 Supreme Court decision, Carpenter v.
United States. Democrats love to bemoan the “chilling effect” of Trump’s perfectly legal actions on everything from budget cuts to immigration enforcement: Where are they on Biden’s favorite special prosecutor illegally going after small-dollar political donors and reporters?
Get opinions and commentary from our columnists Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Then again, the national party seems to be built around contempt for the civil rights of its political enemies: Look at Biden administration efforts to set up a “Disinformation Governance Board” or Attorney General Merrick Garland siccing the FBI on school-board protestors.
To say nothing of Democrats’ open talk now of packing the Supreme Court. Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley’s done the republic a service by bringing Smith’s outrages to light. Too bad Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) gave the deniers an out with his an embarrassing marquee moment, confusing a text message to level a baseless perjury claim.
That unforced error obscured Sen. Josh Hawley’s far more credible perjury charge: Smith was lying when he said in previous House testimony that he couldn’t remember seeking a search warrant for text messages of members of Congress.
Democrats will come back into power someday; if this habit of running roughshod over the rights of anyone who stands in their way politically remains unchecked, it will cause a constitutional crisis of the kind Smith et al have spent the past decade charging Trump with causing.
That’s why Smith and his former masters must be held accountable for the sake of their party’s future — and America’s.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Jack Smith has finally slunk off the stage, and the Democrats are already acting like the whole thing was just a misunderstanding. But the special counsel’s final report was no mere bureaucratic document. It was a confession. For three years, we were told the 2020 election was the most secure in history, then told the man who won it was an insurrectionist who needed to be stopped with the full might of the Justice Department. That isn’t a legal distinction. It’s a political firing squad dressed up in a trench coat.
The real scandal isn’t just that Smith indicted Donald Trump. It’s that he did it on a timeline that ignored the Supreme Court, ignored the statute of limitations, and conveniently forgot every rule about prosecutorial discretion in the run-up to an election. Then, when the new administration swept in, the whole house of cards collapsed. Now the Democrats are offering nothing but silence, hoping the voters were too distracted to notice they just wasted millions of dollars and an entire election cycle on a vendetta that couldn’t even survive a change in management.
For the sake of their own party, they ought to answer for it. The left has spent years telling us that Trump is a threat to democracy, yet they weaponized the federal legal system to remove him from the ballot. That’s not the rule of law. That’s the rule of the powerful. And a party that claims to be the guardian of “norms” should explain why they are so eager to shatter the one that keeps an attorney general from throwing his critics in jail.
There is a simpler path forward, though. It’s the one the voters just took: reject the charade. Treat this report as the epitaph of a shameful chapter, and remember that when the law is used as a sledgehammer, it always shatters the trust of the people first. The Democrats can’t undo Smith’s damage by ignoring it. Their silence is an admission — and the rest of us just heard it loud and clear.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.