Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 indictments are an attack on political speech

IF RECKLESSLY LYING to voters were a crime, most everyone in D.C. would be serving life in solitary confinement at Supermax. But in a liberal democracy, as frustrating as it often is, political misconduct is settled by voters and elections, not partisan prosecutors or rioters.

Feel free to campaign and vote against Donald Trump if you like. I’m certainly no fan. If Trump wins in 2024, Congress can impeach and remove him if they choose. But just as there was no special set of rules that could keep Trump in the White House in 2020, there shouldn’t be an exclusive set of rules to keep him out, either.

Yet Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictments over Jan. 6 read like a political oppo document cobbled together by some partisan House staffers who perfunctorily tacked on the last-minute novel legal reasoning.

Though numerous commentators who have an aversion to Trump have pointed out the weakness of the indictments, it’s quite telling how little media-approved historians and legal “experts” even bother defending the underlying legal case. Trump is evil, a threat to “democracy,” and really what else is there to discuss? In the Trump-addled politics of our age, it is virtually impossible for either side to compartmentalize the process and the person if that person happens to be Trump.

president.”

Tom Friedman, The New York Times columnist authored “The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century” (2005) and calls himself a “free trader” who was a strong advocate for the invasion of Iraq. He also openly supported Hillary Clinton’s, Michael Bloomberg’s and Joe Biden’s presidential campaigns. He’s praised China’s “autocracy.”

He no doubt influenced Biden’s highly inappropriate engagement in Israel’s internal affairs as the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, was poised to pass judicial reforms. In his column, “Only Biden Can Save Israel Now,” he called on Biden to pull Israel back from the brink of what most would consider reasonable reforms. Biden did as Friedman told him, fortunately, to no avail.

The Knesset ignored him.

There is no doubt that first lady Jill Biden has outsized influence over her spouse, not unlike Edith Wilson when President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke during his second term as President. Dr. Jill is rarely more than a step or two away from Biden and frequently shields him from hostile questions.

The White House Easter Bunny ― no kidding. When the president began to take questions at a recent annual White House Easter Egg Roll, a communications staffer, identified as Angela Perez, dressed as the Easter Bunny, stepped in to artfully, steer Biden away from the media. Would it insult Bunny to associate Bidenomics and other domestic policies, from abortion tourism with your tax dollars at the Department of Defense in clear violation of federal law to our open southern border?

Barack Obama. In March 2021, People Magazine reported then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki as saying Biden and the former president keep in touch and talk regularly over the phone. “They were not just the president and vice president,” Psaki said. “They are friends. … I would expect that continues.”

It’s deeper than that, thanks to a Tablet Magazine interview by David Samuels with Obama biographer David Garrow. “I have heard from more than one source that there are regular meetings at Obama’s house in Kalorama (D.C.) involving top figures in the current White House,” Garrow says. “He clearly has his oar in.”

The Biden-Harris Administration is swarming with former Obama staff, and their policies are remarkably similar.

While King Theoden was eventually sprung from his spell by Gandalf, there’s no rescuing Joe Biden from his infirmity. Every day is his best day.

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In this case, the precedent would criminalize and chill political speech. People keep assuring me the indictments aren’t really about the expression but rather about defrauding the government. Sorry, the entire case is predicated on the things Trump said or believed or didn’t say or didn’t believe. All of it should be protected under the First Amendment. “Spreading lies” — prosecutors leaned on the thesaurus hard, finding about two dozen ways of repeating this fact — or entertaining theories offered by crackpot lawyers, or trying to convince faithless electors to do things that people have been trying to convince faithless electors to do for a long time, are all unethical, not criminal.

Nowhere do the indictments come anywhere in the vicinity of making the case that Trump incited “imminent lawless action” on Jan 6. At least no more than, say, the entire Democratic Party had a hand in inciting the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots — the most destructive in American history. This is a dangerous road to go down.

Yes, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago classified documents case is an exercise in the selective use of power for political ends, but it has a basis in law and recent precedent. (Not for Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, but for others.) This, however, isn’t about mere double standards anymore.

When, in 2000, the Supreme Court finally stopped Al Gore’s conspiracy to overturn the outcome of the presidential election, no serious person contemplated throwing him or his lackeys in prison. Since that time, Democrats haven’t only been lying about elections, they have tried to stop the certification of every national election as well.

When they fail, people like Adam Schiff will use a DNC political oppo document to concoct a conspiracy, illegally leaking classified documents — in carefully curated snippets to mislead the country — to overturn the will of the American voter. This effort also resulted in expensive investigations that defrauded the American people.

The point isn’t that we should imprison Gore — or Stacey Abrams or Hillary Clinton or Ron Klain or John Kerry or Bennie Thompson or Barbara Lee or Maxine Waters or Raul Grijalva or James Clyburn or Ed Markey or Nancy Pelosi, or many others who have tried in various ways to challenge election results in the past. It’s to say that Trump’s actions laid out in the indictments aren’t crimes, either.

Perhaps Smith doesn’t really expect Trump to end up in prison over any of these indictments. As his foray into the partisan prosecution of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, overturned 8-0 by the Supreme Court, this case is grounded on a “boundless” reading of statute. The law isn’t the point. The point is likely to make Jan. 6 — and hysterical claims about American democracy’s near demise — the centerpiece of the 2024 election.

Granted, allowing Joe Biden’s record to be the central issue of that 2024 campaign is potentially disastrous for Democrats. These indictments, however, create a deterioration of law that Americans will have to live with long after the next presidential election.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of five books — the most recent, “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent.”