The new charges against the former president are as specious and partisan as we’ve come to expect.
Source - Spiked 29/08/24
Good news, friends! The hit show, ‘Get Trump’, has been renewed again. Season 88 will be returning in September, when there will be yet another court hearing in Washington, DC, thanks to the efforts of prosecutor Jack Smith.
Smith announced yesterday that he has ‘streamlined’ his original indictment – alleging that Trump had illegally attempted to overturn the 2020 election – to reflect a Supreme Court ruling in July, which found that presidents have substantial immunity from prosecution for their official actions. That ruling ‘immediately knocked out some of the central allegations that special counsel Jack Smith levelled against Trump, including claims that he attempted to weaponise his Justice Department’, Politico reported last month.
But that pesky detail was not going to stop special counsel Smith. The Supreme Court found that presidents can still be held accountable for their ‘personal’ actions. And so the new case is built upon the theory that Trump’s dealings with then vice-president Mike Pence in the days preceding Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, as Trump loudly contested the election results while still president, somehow had nothing to do with his presidential status.
Whatever you might think about Trump’s claims of election fraud, how can anyone reasonably argue that this was merely a personal matter? As Politico notes this week, the new indictment seeks to ‘downplay any connection between Trump’s official duties and his bid to overturn Joe Biden’s victory’, while repeatedly emphasising ‘the political and personal nature of many of the actions Trump took’. Thus, Pence, whom Trump pressured not to certify the 2020 election results, is presented as both Trump’s then vice-president (an official role) and his ‘running mate’ (supposedly a purely personal relationship). It notes that Trump’s rally on 6 January 2021, before the storming of the Capitol, was ‘privately funded’ and ‘privately organised’. It also argues that Trump often used his Twitter account for ‘personal purposes’.
It seems like a flimsy plot-twist to me. I personally thought American audiences had tired of these legal procedural dramas, but what do I know? Obviously, the geniuses in the Democratic power apparatus think they are on to a good thing in endlessly pursuing Trump through the courts. This latest indictment brings the rap sheet to a whopping 88 criminal charges over four separate cases across four states.
Trump was, of course, convicted earlier this year in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business documents. But questions are still being raised about that so-called hush-money trial. Yesterday, Congress announced that it had subpoenaed the company co-owned by the presiding judge’s daughter, owing to its financial ties to the Biden-Harris campaign. Democratic political clients of Judge Merchan’s daughter, Loren Merchan, raised millions of dollars using the New York indictment in a fundraising email. Ms Merchan’s business partner, Mike Nellis, also happens to be a former senior adviser to Kamala Harris and ‘organiser for #WhiteDudesforHarris’, according to his profile on X. Yet none of this has given zealous prosecutors a moment’s pause.
Nor has the connections of Jack Smith’s wife, filmmaker Katy Chevigny, come under much scrutiny. She once worked on a hagiographic documentary about Michelle Obama and donated to Biden’s 2020 campaign. Funny how the definition of what constitutes a ‘personal’ matter only works in one direction?
But never mind all that. The ‘Get Trump’ show must go on.
Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.
Close
Comments
Post a Comment