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Trump Just Gave Jack Smith an Unexpected Gift — And Trump Isn’t Going to Be Very Happy About it

The right-wing narrative has changed so many times it's hard to keep up.

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In a 2021 interview with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, Donald Trump went on the record saying that he attempted to go back to the Capitol on January 6 to stop the riots from continuing.

Why would he do that, if he didn’t know they were awful?

Karl is promoting his new book about Trump, Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party. In the audio, Trump tells the journalist, “No, I was going to, and then Secret Service said you can’t. I wanted to go back. I was thinking about going back during the problem to stop the problem, doing it myself. Secret Service didn’t like that idea too much.”

Sounds to me like Trump knew exactly what was happening back at the Capitol and that it was wrong. He even called it “the problem.”

Now Trump, during his campaign stops, is using a recording of a song called “Justice For All,” which is sung by “the January 6 Choir,” a group of those imprisoned for their unlawful actions at the Capitol that day. It features the inmates singing and Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance on an overdub.

That sounds like he’s making the Capitol riots out to be a good thing.

This could be a giant gift tied up in a bow for Special Counsel Jack Smith, who entered a filing earlier this month citing Trump’s use of the choir:

“In the years since January 6, despite his knowledge of the violent actions at the Capitol, the defendant has publicly praised and defended rioters and their conduct.”

Now that Jonathan Karl has released the audio of his interview that shows just how bad Trump knew the rioters were, it shows that he was fully aware of the situation and that it’s not “selective and vindictive prosecution” to take him to court over this. That’s what Jack Smith was replying to with this filing: Trump lawyers were trying to have the case dismissed because, they said, it was purely political.

But Trump instead bragged about how much the rioters loved him, how they would have welcomed him back to the scene as a hero.

Jack Smith is probably smiling pretty big today.

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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