2024 Election
Trump’s Terrifying Threat to Jack Smith Should Be a Huge Warning to All Americans
He's more brazen than ever these days.
Appearing Thursday on right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt’s show, Donald Trump told the world exactly what he would do with Special Counsel Jack Smith if he were to win in November.
“Oh it’s so easy. It’s so easy. He’s a crooked person. It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said.
Smith, who has been handling the criminal cases against Trump surrounding his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, probably isn’t all that worried. He’s likely pretty sure, like most of us, that America’s not dumb enough to give Trump the job again. And if the country were to go down that road, it’s very likely that Trump would be impeached if he so blatantly tried to punish someone for investigating him.
Not that Trump himself thinks that’s going to happen, though. Even if the Democrats control the House, Trump said, “I don’t think they’ll impeach me if I fire Jack Smith. Jack Smith is a scoundrel. He’s a very dishonest man.”
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He’s not, of course. Smith is doing his job, and he’s doing it well. He’s even been able to come up with a way to re-indict the convicted felon after the Supreme Court that Trump stacked with conservatives largely gave him “presidential immunity” from prosecution for “acts related to the execution of his office.”
While it’s new news that Trump intends to retaliate specifically against Smith, the fact that he plans to use the office to get back at anyone and everyone he thinks has wronged him is nothing new.
The Kamala Harris campaign called this out as evidence that Trump would be unbound by the concepts of civility or legal propriety, should he move back into the Oval Office:
“Donald Trump thinks he’s above the law, and these latest comments are right in line with the warnings made by Trump’s former Chief of Staff that he wants to rule as a dictator with unchecked power,” Harris campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said, referring to John Kelly’s admission that Trump is a fascist. “A second Trump term, where a more unstable and unhinged Trump has essentially no guardrails and is surrounded by loyalists who will enable his worst instincts, is guaranteed to be more dangerous. America can’t risk a second Trump term.”
Smith was finally appointed by US Attorney General Merrick Garland late in 2022 to oversee multiple investigations into Trump, including the criminal charges related to the effort to change the 2020 election results and another case involving improper handling and storage of classified documents, some at his own Mar-a-Lago home.
In the latter investigation, we learned that Trump even had boxes of files in his bathroom, raising exactly zero doubts as to whether he knew if he was allowed to possess the documents or not.
The documents case was actually already thrown out by Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon, although there is an appeal underway, and it’s widely expected that the DC Appeals court will throw out her ruling. What’s truly terrifying is that Cannon had herself been on a shortlist for Attorney General, and likely would be again, should Trump win another term.
If that ever came to be, America would be in a circular pattern of wrongdoing by Trump, excused by judges loyal to Trump after he appointed them. The SCOTUS is bad enough — a Trump-friendly DOJ would be an absolute nightmare.
In the criminal case that’s ongoing, the Supreme Court had ruled that many of the details of the four charges Smith brough against Trump for election interference were inadmissible due to Trump’s status as President at the time the crimes occurred.
Smith successfully submitted basically an entirely new case with all those same details, including troves of testimony from Trump’s own appointees and Republican allies. But the second time around, he was able to re-frame all of the crimes as having been committed by a candidate for the 2020 race — who just happened to also be the president at the time.
In fact, by taking that angle, Smith almost made his case stronger, since Trump attempted to influence Mike Pence to intervene on his behalf. The fact that the Vice President is technically the president of the Senate makes it now a case of Trump attempting to influence Congress — as a private citizen — to help him win the presidency through underhanded means.
What all of that adds up to is plenty of reason for Trump to want to be rid of Smith, and it’s increasingly looking like the only way we can avoid allowing Trump to escape the consequences of his actions is to make sure he’s not elected in 12 days.
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