Welcome back, Jack!
In truth, the special counsel never went away. He has clearly been busy this summer, tweaking the four-count federal indictment of Donald Trump in the coup conspiracy case, seeking to ensure that it won’t be thwarted a second time by the MAGA-infested Supreme Court.
It’s amazing to me that this development has taken a back seat in the news cycle to the latest Trump desecration, his breach of federal rules banning political photo ops at Arlington National Cemetery. We’ve known for years that Trump demeans dead soldiers, nothing new there. Somehow it seems more important that Jack Smith still has his hooks in the crook, that he intends to move forward with his momentous evidence – meticulously detailed in the tweaked indictment – that a lame duck president plotted to overturn his ’20 election defeat and to violently disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
So I’ll treat this story with the importance it deserves. I’m most interested in the political ramifications of the new indictment – its potential impact on the Harris-Trump presidential race – but first, this brief summary of what just happened in the judicial realm:
Trump’s servants on the high court recently ruled that he deserved prosecutorial immunity for all his “official” acts as president. But now Smith is essentially saying, “Fine. I’ll remove whatever Trump did in his ‘official’ capacity, which means I’ve removed nine pages out of my original 45-page indictment. That still leaves me with 36 pages that detail what he did as a candidate, outside his ‘official’ capacity” – like how Trump stoked his goons to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, like how he sought to block the lawful certification of his loss, like how he fomented “a conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted,” and so much more. A new federal grand jury approved the charges.
Politically speaking, Smith’s updated “superseding” indictment has sharpened the stark contrast between the prosecutor (Kamala Harris) and the felon (guilty in the hush money case). Granted, millions of Americans don’t care that one of the presidential candidates is a convicted criminal, and those folks don’t view this campaign through the prism of prosecutor-versus-felon. Nevertheless, there’s one guy who’s very concerned about Smith’s latest move. It’s the felon himself.
In the last 24 hours Trump has been gyrating like the Tasmanian devil in the old Looney Tunes cartoons – calling for “career criminal” Smith to be arrested and prosecuted, spreading images of Harris and Joe Biden in prison jumpsuits, demanding that Barack Obama be tried in a military tribunal, recycling sexual slurs about Harris – all of which has prompted sane conservative commentator David Frum to denounce (yet again) Trump’s “unceasing flow of obscenity, threat, malice, misogyny, deceit, mania, and stupidity.”
Trump is also screaming that Smith’s tweaked indictment is “election interference,” a violation of Justice Department policy that no federal charges can be filed against a candidate within 60 days of an election. I know it will shock you to learn that the coup case defendant is lying: (1) It’s not a new indictment; these are amendments to the original indictment that was filed last year, and (2) The tweaked indictment was filed 70 days before the election anyway.
He needn’t worry about sitting through a Washington criminal trial prior to the election; his lawyers have done a boffo job slow-walking the case, and his high court enablers gummed up the machinery just as he hoped they would. And there will be umpteen court appeals in the months ahead, as everyone wrangles over Smith’s indictment. But Trump, though terminally stupid on matters of substance, nevertheless understands optics – and he knows it’s not helpful to have this criminal case alive and well and in the news between now and Nov. 5. Kamala Harris, if she so chooses, can zing him with it during the Sept. 10 debate and beyond.
Lest we forget, he needs to win this election in order to kill the case and escape consequences, as he’s done his entire adult life. A defeat in November will ensure that the case stays alive and that he will risk a federal conviction. No wonder he’s so freaked out. In 68 days, his fate will be decided by the most populous jury of all.