Special Council Corruption and Malfeasance

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Jackboot Smith Aims to Silence Trump​

Smith’s sweeping motion would essentially silence Trump–preventing him from criticizing the Special Counsel, law enforcement, the electoral process, or just about anything else.

I am pretty sure that if Smith gets his way, the only words Trump or his lawyers could utter would be “Guilty, Your Honor.”

Special counsel Jack Smith filed a motion Wednesday in Donald Trump’s federal election interference case seeking to block him from making political arguments and referring to conspiracy theories during the trial.

“The Court should not permit the defendant to turn the courtroom into a forum in which he propagates irrelevant disinformation, and should reject his attempt to inject politics into this proceeding,” the filing reads.

Smith asked the court to prohibit Trump from advancing “a theory of selective or vindictive prosecution or to otherwise improperly inject politics into the trial.”
Smith pointed to Trump’s arguments that he is only being prosecuted for political reasons.

“In addition to being wrong, these allegations are irrelevant to the jury’s determination of the defendant’s guilt or innocence, would be prejudicial if presented to the jury, and must be excluded,” the special counsel wrote.

Additionally, Smith seeks to have the court prohibit Trump from telling the jury arguments he’s made publicly that others are to blame for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, “including law enforcement, military forces, unidentified secret agents, and foreign influence.”

You can accept or not Trump’s arguments, but not allowing him to make his case in court would be yet another egregious attack on the Constitution.

You can defend yourself, but only if you stipulate everything the prosecution alleges.

Some justice.

Smith also asked the court to prohibit Trump from arguing to the jury that the reason for the Jan. 6 attack was ill-prepared law enforcement.
“The defendant cannot argue that law enforcement should have prevented the violence he caused and obstruction he intended,” Smith wrote.
Trump has repeatedly argued in public that the case against him is purely political and that Smith is only prosecuting him because he is running for a second term. Trump has sought to depict the prosecution as an arm of President Joe Biden’s political operation.

It is as if the whole point of Smith’s prosecution is to prove that the Deep State exists and will do just about anything to harm Donald Trump and his supporters. Gagging any defendant in a manner to prevent his making a defense is indefensible; gagging a presidential candidate in the middle of an election season is, as I said, Putinesque.

 

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Appeals Court to Consider Constitutionality of Jack Smith’s Appointment​

But first, as suggested by the appeals court’s announcement, Smith’s appointment itself might have to survive.

The amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief filed by Meese, Calabresi, and Lawson argues that Smith lacks authority to represent the United States because the office he holds has not been created by Congress and his appointment violates the “Appointments Clause” of the Constitution. They argue that only Congress can create federal offices such as Smith currently holds, which Congress has not done.

The Constitution created the offices of president and vice president while giving Congress the sole authority to create additional offices, making clear those offices must be “established by Law.” While Congress previously passed a law to authorize a similar position called an “independent counsel,” that statute expired in 1999.

The attorneys argue Garland cannot hire a mere employee to perform tasks that Congress has not authorized. Only an “officer” can hold such a significant level of authority. By law, Congress gave the Department of Justice certain powers when creating it, yet it authorized no office with the extensive powers of a U.S. Attorney — a position requiring Senate confirmation — that Garland has given Smith.

They assert that even if special counsels were authorized by Congress — which they have not been since 1999 — anyone in possession of such powers would require presidential nomination and Senate confirmation.

 

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Jack Smith warns about risks to confidential witnesses in Trump case​

The filings come as the existence of a criminal investigation into threats “over social media” against an unspecified witness in the case became public Wednesday in a separate court filing.

Citing a “concrete and palpable” risk to witnesses that “other judges have recognized,” special counsel Jack Smith is asking the judge overseeing the case to reverse a previous order that evidence in filings by Trump’s attorneys should be made public.

Prosecutors argue that not just the names be withheld, asking the substance of witnesses’ statements to the FBI and testimony at grand jury hearings be blocked because they could lead to the identification of witnesses.

The new filings from Smith’s team repeatedly complain that release will put witnesses at risk, including the FBI agents who searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

“The Court should not tolerate this barely veiled attempt to slide into the public record, by first and last name, the participation of over twenty FBI personnel in the search,” prosecutors wrote.

Trump’s legal team was not immediately available for comment. However, Charles Tobin, lawyer for the media coalition, provided Scripps News with the following statement:

"The court has already agreed, as the coalition of newsrooms argued, that it has a First Amendment duty to independently determine whether the government, or Trump, has met their burden whenever they ask to seal court records. The public interest in this historic prosecution demands maximum transparency."

 

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Judge Cannon Admonishes Special Counsel’s Prosecutor, Says Jack Smith’s Proposed July 8 Trial Date in Classified Docs Case “Unrealistic”



Judge Cannon on Friday didn’t set a new trial date but she said the special counsel’s early July proposed date is “unrealistic.”

The judge, a Trump appointee, also admonished Jack Smith’s prosecutor for blaming Trump’s attorneys for taking on both the Bragg ‘hush payment’ case and the classified docs case.

“When Smith’s team tried to blame Trump attorney Chris Kise for taking on both the Bragg case and the classified docs case and argued his work schedule related to both matters should not preclude the FLA trial from moving forward, Judge Cannon reminded DOJ that right to access all court proceedings doesn’t apply to the lawyers but “to the accused.”” reporter Julie Kelly said from the courthouse on Friday.

 

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Jack Smith Trying to ‘Provoke’ Federal Judge, Alan Dershowitz Warns​

But Mr. Dershowitz, a former high-profile criminal defense lawyer, said in a recent interview that Mr. Smith is “terrified” of a “fair trial in Florida” because he’s “not going to have a fair trial in Washington D.C. [where] 95 percent of the voters hate Donald Trump, he knows there’s not going to be a fair trial in Georgia, [and] certainly not in New York.” He was referring to the three other criminal cases in which President Trump faces charges.

“This judge in a fair county in Florida might actually give Donald Trump his rights to a fair trial, so he’s doing everything to provoke the judge, possibly make a motion to recuse,” he told Fox News last week.
The recent filings by the Smith team might be an attempt to “provoke the judge” in Florida into issuing a rushed order that prosecutors can appeal, said Mr. Dershowitz, who has been largely critical of the indictments against President Trump.

“The Trump people are being accused of trying to delay the trial,” Mr. Dershowitz said. “That’s nonsense, it’s the prosecution that’s trying to rush the trial. Jack Smith said the people of the United States are entitled to a guilty verdict before they decide who to vote for. That’s ... actually an admission of election interference.”

 

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'F**king CLOWN Show': Julie Kelly Shares DAMNING Unredacted Evidence from Trump's Classified Docs Case

twitchy.com

 

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Liz Cheney's NIGHTMARE UNFOLDS As SCOTUS Looks To NUKE Jack Smith Trials Until After Election!​

 

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Justice Thomas Raises Scrutiny On Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Appointment In Trump Hearing​

Mr. Sauer said he agrees with the “analysis provided by Attorney General [Edwin] Meese and Attorney General [Michael B.] Mukasey,” referring to the amicus brief the two former attorneys general submitted to the Supreme Court on March 19.

In it, the two attorneys general noted that irrespective of what one thinks about the immunity issue, Mr. Smith “does not have authority to conduct the underlying prosecution.”

“Those actions can be taken only by persons properly appointed as federal officers to properly created federal offices. Smith wields tremendous power, and effectively answers to no one,” they wrote.

“However, neither Smith nor the position of special counsel under which he purportedly acts meets those criteria. And that is a serious problem for the rule of law, whatever one may think of the conduct at issue in Smith’s prosecution.”

Attorney General Garland appointed Mr. Smith as Special Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) citing several statutes.

However, none of these statutes even “remotely authorized the appointment by the Attorney General of a private citizen or government employee to receive extraordinary criminal law enforcement power under the title of Special Counsel.”

The two attorneys general added there are times when the appointment of a special counsel would be appropriate and that the U.S. Constitution allows for such appointments.

However, “the Attorney General cannot appoint someone never confirmed by the Senate, as a substitute United States Attorney under the title ‘special counsel,’” they added.

“Smith’s appointment was thus unlawful, as are all actions flowing from it, including his prosecution of former President Trump.”

 

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BAM! Clarence Thomas Questions Jack Smith's Appointment As Trump Prosecutor




Two former Attorneys General, Edwin Meese and Michael Mukasey, filed an amicus brief that questions whether or not Jack Smith has the right to prosecute Trump. From the brief:

Although this case raises a weighty issue of presidential immunity, it also necessarily raises a preliminary question, i.e., whether Jack Smith actually has authority to prosecute this case all. He does not. Those actions can be taken only by persons properly appointed as federal officers to properly created federal offices. But neither Smith nor the position of Special Counsel under which he purportedly acts meets those criteria. He wields tremendous power, effectively answerable to no one, by design. And that is a serious problem for the rule of law—whatever one may think of former President Trump or the conduct on January 6, 2021, that Smith challenges in the underlying case.

The brief isn't just a stalling tactic; it has legal merit. It continues:

And even if one overlooks the absence of statutory authority for the position, there is no statute specifically authorizing the Attorney General, rather than the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint such a Special Counsel. And in any event, the Special Counsel, if a valid officer, is a principal rather than inferior officer, and thus cannot be appointed without senatorial confirmation regardless of what any statutes say. In short, Smith’s appointment was unlawful, as are all the legal actions that have flowed from it, including Smith’s prosecution of former President Trump.

In other words, prosecutor Jack Smith, whose duty is to send Trump to prison, shouldn't have the job at all.

Biden and his yobbish myrmidons had to know this, leading us to wonder if it has all been yet another clown-like smokescreen to make Trump look bad.

If lefty Trump-hating galoots can be led to believe that "Orange Man Bad" told people to drink bleach and swallow horse pills, surely the same stooges will jump on the notion that the "Cheeto in charge" is a traitor caught with nuclear secrets which he planned to sell to Saudi Arabia.

No, seriously. Newsweek ran an article about just that back in 2022. Naturally, the accusation relies on "anonymous sources" with the Washington Post, which is another way to say "The CIA told us."

FACT-O-RAMA! Operation Mockingbird, the CIA's takeover of news outlets, is still happening. You can read the Church Committee Report on Foreign and Military Intelligence of 1976, (page 455) and see that the CIA is still in charge of news outlets worldwide.

Jack Smith has other problems to deal with as well. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) recently hit Smith with an ethics violation, accusing him of election interference.

 

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Special Counsel Jack Smith Admits Prosecutors Misled Judge in Trump Case​

Prosecutors in a court filing said that in some of the boxes FBI agents seized from President Trump’s Florida resort, the order of papers has been changed from shortly after the seizure.

Prosecutors compared scans of the boxes done in 2022 under orders from Judge Cannon to the present state of the boxes and noticed that the order is not the same.

“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” Mr. Smith’s team said.

In a footnote, prosecutors acknowledged that the update contrasts with what they told the judge less than one month ago, during a hearing in the case.

When Judge Cannon during the hearing asked whether the boxes were “in their original, intact form as seized,” a prosecutor on the team said, “they are, with one exception; and that is that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents.”

Prosecutors were unable to confirm why the order of papers was changed but offered a theory.

 

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Jack Smith’s Lawfare Scheme Under Scrutiny and Fraying​

May 7, 2024 | Sundance | 132 Comments

In the classified documents case, Florida federal judge Aileen Cannon has noted the Lawfare construct of this fraudulent legal case. In practice “Lawfare” is about manipulating the narrative of a manufactured legal controversy or premise, and sometimes actual laws themselves, to change public opinion about the target of the Lawfare action. Judge Cannon clearly sees this playing out in the background of the case.

(Via NBC) – Judge Aileen Cannon has granted Donald Trump a delay in the classified documents trial by pushing back a court deadline in the case.

On Monday, Judge Cannon temporarily stayed a May 9 deadline for Trump and his two co-defendants in the federal case to submit court filings. It relates to Section 5(a) of the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), which would disclose what sensitive materials Trump intends to use at the trial.

[…] Cannon submitted court filings on Monday “temporarily staying” the CIPA request regarding what classified materials the defendants intend to use in the trial and what expert witnesses Trump’s legal team intends to call at the trial in Florida.

Cannon did not offer any explanation as to why the May 9 CIPA deadline has been indefinitely postponed, only stating that an “order setting second set of pretrial deadlines/hearings to follow.” (read more)

NBC may pretend not to know why Judge Cannon has changed the hearing date and purpose; however, CTH, you and journalist Julie Kelly can clearly see why Cannon is slowing down the process simultaneous to her putting increased sunlight on the case.

Recently, the special counsel was forced to admit they staged the pictures they gave to the media during the raid on Mar-a-Lago. Again, the purpose of Lawfare is to create the optics of unlawful action to manipulate public opinion; therein, lies the motive for “staging” images under false pretenses.

[VIA Julie Kelly] […] Jay Bratt, who was the lead DOJ prosecutor on the investigation at the time and now is assigned to Smith’s team, described the photo this way in his August 30, 2022 response to Trump’s special master lawsuit:

“[Thirteen] boxes or containers contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings…were seized. Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status. (Emphasis added.) See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ‘45 office’).”

The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.

Classified cover sheets were not “recovered” in the container, contrary to Bratt’s declaration to the court. In fact, after being busted recently by defense attorneys for mishandling evidence in the case, Bratt had to fess up about how the cover sheets actually ended up on the documents.

Here is Bratt’s new version of the story, where he finally admits a critical detail that he failed to disclose in his August 2022 filing:

“[If] the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose.”

But before the official cover sheets were used as placeholder, agents apparently used them as props. FBI agents took it upon themselves to paperclip the sheets to documents—something evident given the uniform nature of how each cover sheet is clipped to each file in the photo—laid them on the floor, and snapped a picture for political posterity. (more)

While it is always best to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best, there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic that Judge Cannon will eventually dismiss this ridiculous Lawfare case. If she does not dismiss the case, one of the reasons she may elect to keep the case going is simply to allow more sunlight on how the case was constructed.

 

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Political Hitman Jack Smith Admits to Violating the Same Law as J6 Defendants Who Were Sent to Prison for Years​

It was all another set up from our totally corrupt DOJ and FBI.

This past weekend Judge Cannon redacted documents previously concealed to the American public.

The unredacted documents prove the raid on Mar-a-Lago was all a set up as we previously reported.

Julie Kelly reported on X that an entire pallet full of boxes that was held by GSA was later dumped at Mar-a-Lago. These boxes contained the papers with “classified markings.”








But now political hitman Jack Smith may have finally pushed the envelope too far.

It appears Jack Smith committed the same criminal act as Biden’s Special Counsel as the criminal act Joe Biden’s DOJ is using to put January 6 defendants in prison.

Now reporter Andrea Widburg at American Thinker has noticed something missed by the legacy media and mainstream leftists — Hitman Jack Smith violated the same law that the Biden regime is using to jail J6 protesters for attending a rally and committing no violence!

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has just admitted that he and other DOJ and FBI minions manipulated documentary evidence underlying the Mar-a-Lago case against Donald Trump. Everybody from Judge Aileen Cannon on down realizes this is bad. Still, I wonder how many people have noticed that Smith has admitted to doing what the J6 defendants are accused and have been convicted of doing: Violating 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2). The statutory charges against the J6 defendants are a specious abuse of the law but they perfectly fit Smith’s admitted conduct.
One of the main tools in the DOJ arsenal against anyone near the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is § 1512(c)(2), which the DOJ claims means imprisonment for a person who “corruptly…obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding…” That is what the DOJ claims happened when ordinary Americans (a) exercised their rights of free speech and (b) usually inadvertently, entered onto Capitol land after masked agitators had removed “no trespassing” signage and fencing and after the Capitol police had opened the building’s doors. The penalty is fines and/or imprisonment, with the latter potentially as long as 20 years…
…To imprison ordinary Americans, the DOJ came down hard on subsection (c)(2) of the statute because it contains the phrase “official proceeding.”

(c) Whoever corruptly—
[snip]
(2) otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so,

But while the DOJ is focusing everyone’s attention on subsection (2), they’re ignoring subsection (1):

(c) Whoever corruptly—
(1) alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding…

It reminds me of Smith’s admission to Judge Aileen Cannon about his and his minions’ handling of the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago, documents that then served as the basis for his decision to indict Donald Trump.

Read the entire piece by Andrea Widburg here.