So here we go again, with "here" being yet another attempt by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan — dare I say in cahoots with Special Counsel Jack Smith? — to influence the 2024 presidential election.
Chutkan agreed Thursday to unseal additional filings from Smith laying out his election interference case against Donald Trump, which the former president's attorneys plan to immediately challenge.
Chutkan granted Smith’s motion to release redacted versions of the prosecution's filings, which could include grand jury transcripts, texts, and other evidence assembled by prosecutors. The brief reportedly contains damning allegations, including witness accounts, against Trump.
Chutkan wrote:
The court determines that the Government’s proposed redactions to the Appendix are appropriate, and that Defendant’s blanket objections to further unsealing are without merit. As the court has stated previously, ‘Defendant’s concern with the political consequences of these proceedings’ is not a cognizable legal prejudice.
Trump's legal team wrote in an earlier Thursday filing:
There should be no further disclosures at this time of the so-called ‘evidence’ that the Special Counsel’s Office has unlawfully cherry-picked and mischaracterized — during early voting in the 2024 Presidential election.
Yet those requests from Smith and granted motions by Chutkan have continued as the election has drawn nearer and nearer.
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George Washington University Law School Professor and Fox News senior legal analyst Jonathan Turley reacted to this latest development in the case the same way he has reacted to previous developments: The noted constitutional authority criticized the daylights out of it.
It appears that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan and Special Counsel Jack Smith are not done yet in releasing material in advance of the election. In a previous column, I criticized the release of Smith’s 180-page brief before the election as procedurally irregular and politically biased, a criticism shared by CNN’s senior legal analyst and other law professors.
Nevertheless, on Thursday, Judge Chutkan agreed to a request from Smith to unseal exhibits and evidence in advance of the election. The brief clearly contains damning allegations, including witness accounts, for Trump. The objection to the release of the brief was not a defense of any actions taken on January 6th by the former president or others, but rather an objection to what even the court admitted was an “irregular” process.
As discussed earlier, Smith has been unrelenting in his demands for a trial before the election. He has even demanded that Donald Trump be barred from standard appellate options in order to expedite his trial.
Smith relentlessly sought to hold Trump's trial prior to the election, arguing that voters should see the trial and verdict pre-election. Turley has contended that the prosecutor's actions consist of "assaulting the very premise of the Justice Department’s rule against such actions just before elections."
Emphasis, mine:
To avoid allegations of political manipulation of cases, the Justice Department has long followed a policy against making potentially influential filings within 60 or 90 days of an election. One section of the Justice Department manual states “Federal prosecutors… may never select the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election.”
Even if one argues that this provision is not directly controlling or purely discretionary, the spirit of the policy is to avoid precisely the appearance in this case: the effort to manipulate or influence an election through court filings.
While I'm not an attorney, I am a reasonably intelligent person asking an obviously rational question. How can the combined efforts of Jack Smith and Tanya Chutkan be seen as anything but a violation of all of the above?
Turley further argued that there is no logical reason why Smith or Chutkan would pursue such an "irregular process" given that there is no trial date set for 2025.
If there is one time where a court should err on the side of avoiding an irregular process, it is before a national election. What may look like simply an adversarial process to some looks like oppo research to others. Delaying the release would have avoided any appearance of such bias.
Precisely, further suggesting that the only pre-election objective of Smith and Chutkan is to release as much damning information about Trump as possible, solely for public consumption and fodder for the Trump-loathing left-wing media.
In somewhat related news, as I reported on Monday, Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton dismantled NBC's "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker last Sunday over the Oct. 2 release of Smith's 165-page motion against Trump, alleging election interference before and after the 2020 presidential election.
Well, what I think about what Jack Smith did this week is that it was a temper tantrum from a deranged fanatic who is angry that he keeps losing time and time again in the Supreme Court over the course of his career.
This is unverified, un-cross-examined hearsay from grand jury testimony, which usually isn’t revealed publicly for that reason. He went to court. He asked for special permission to file a brief that’s four times as long as a normal brief and to have it disclosed less than 30 days before the election. This is professional misconduct in all likelihood by Jack Smith and it should be investigated.
This is a perfect example of actual election interference: Jack Smith violating Department of Justice regulations to try to get out as much unverified, so-called evidence as he has because he’s angry that he lost and the Democrats don’t think they can beat Donald Trump on issues like inflation and immigration.
Did Sen.Cotton perfectly sum up the ever-bitter special counsel, or what?
READ MORE:
Tom Cotton Just Decimates 'Deranged Fanatic' Jack Smith,
Says Latest Action Is 'Election Interference'
The Bottom Line
If it's even possible, the left is more terrified of Trump winning in November than conservatives are afraid of a Harris victory. And here's the dirty little non-secret secret:
Democrat elites, including Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, don't really believe Trump threatens democracy in America any more than they believe a Trump win would mean the end of presidential elections. What they very much believe is if Harris and Walz don't win, their radical leftist policies will be dead in the water.
