Nobody could ever have envisioned that somebody with as much criminal energy as Donald Trump would serve or be elected as president, which is why he will get away with staging a coup and hoarding classified documents.
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It looks as though Donald Trump will be able to escape any accountability for his 2020 coup attempt after special counsel Jack Smith on Monday filed a motion to dismiss the criminal case against the incoming president.
Trump, a convicted felon, benefits from a longstanding Department of Justice policy that a president cannot be indicted or criminally prosecuted while in office.
However, seeing how Trump faced multiple indictments that were handed down against him when he was a private person, his case tested the system… which ultimately buckled.
In his motion, Smith stressed that the decision to let the former president off the hook has nothing to do with the “the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind.”
In other words, Trump avoided justice, and his strategy of delaying the various cases paid off.
For those who value the rule of law, this is a sad day.
For those who are happy that the instigator of a coup gets away with it, however, it was a joyous occasion.
And, in typical GOP fashion, those applauding the decision didn’t bother with the truth, i.e., that Smith was motivated by a DOJ policy that prohibited this case from going forward.
Instead, one MAGA hanger-on after another made it sound as though this motion was an admission that Trump’s prosecution was based on politics and not the voluminous evidence showing that he tried to overturn the 2020 election and incited an insurrection.
“The prosecutions against Trump reeked of lawfare when they brought the charges,” stated erstwhile GOP presidential hopeful and MAGA cheerleader Vivek Ramaswamy. “The fact they’re now dropping charges & avoiding sentencing simply confirms that it was really just politics all along. Pretty disgusting.”
Of course, it might be more disgusting to so grossly distort the truth.
Speaking of grossly distorting the truth, Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, claimed Smith’s decision was “another legal victory” for the former president (it was not), that the indictment was “unconstitutional” to begin with (it was not), and that this is “a major victory for the rule of law” (it was not).
In a separate filing, Smith also dropped an appeal of the ruling from pro-Trump judge Aileen Cannon that dismissed another criminal case involving the former president — this one regarding the classified documents that he kept at his Mar-a-Lago residence.
While that indictment also described the alleged hoarding of these documents, as well as attempts to obstruct justice, in great detail, Smith will also be forced to abandon this case because the DOJ never imagined that anybody with this much criminal energy would occupy the White House or get elected president.
In retrospect, that seems like a bit of an oversight.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
