After Donald Trump’s inauguration, he probably won’t be able to fire special counsel Jack Smith — though he clearly wants to — because the prosecutor will likely step down from his post before Jan. 20.
The incoming president will, however, have an opportunity to go after the outgoing special counsel’s colleagues, and according to The Washington Post, these officials are apparently near the top of Trump’s revenge list.
President-elect Donald Trump plans to fire the entire team that worked with special counsel Jack Smith to pursue two federal prosecutions against the former president, including career attorneys typically protected from political retribution, according to two individuals close to Trump’s transition.
While the Post’s account hasn’t been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, Trump’s political operation didn’t make much of an effort to deny the accuracy of the reporting.
“President Trump campaigned on firing rogue bureaucrats who have engaged in the illegal weaponization of our American justice system, and the American people can expect he will deliver on that promise,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “One of the many reasons that President Trump won the election in a landslide is Americans are sick and tired of seeing their tax dollars spent on targeting the Biden-Harris Administration’s political enemies rather than going after real violent criminals in our streets.”
None of this made sense. Members of the special counsel’s team aren’t “rogue bureaucrats”; they’re law enforcement professionals who pursued highly credible criminal cases based on voluminous evidence. Meanwhile, there’s literally no evidence of “illegal weaponization of our American justice system” — at least not from the last four years.
What’s more, the idea that Trump “won the election in a landslide” is demonstrably silly, especially given the inconvenient fact that more Americans voted against him than for him, and the idea that the Biden administration is indifferent to “real violent criminals” is belied by the recent drop in the nation’s violent crime rate.
All of which is to say that Leavitt, the incoming White House press secretary, doesn’t appear to have any idea what she’s talking about.
But more to the point, her statement appeared intended to justify Trump’s reported plans to fire law enforcement professionals who didn’t do anything wrong. Such retaliation would represent a radical abuse of power and, in a healthy political environment, a genuine scandal.
Alas, there’s apparently some disagreement on this point. NBC News reported:
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., on Sunday suggested that one of President-elect Donald Trump’s first priorities in his new term should be to fire any staff at the Justice Department who worked on cases that involved charges against Trump. “First and foremost, the people involved with this should be fired immediately,” Schmitt said in an interview on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
The far-right Missouri Republican, during an interview in which he peddled an oddly conspiratorial vision, went on to say that prosecutors targeted Trump “because they didn’t like his politics.”
Again, to the extent that reality matters, Schmitt’s pitch was absurd: Smith and his prosecutorial team indicted Trump because they uncovered voluminous evidence of alleged felonies. We know this for certain because the highly detailed and incredibly compelling indictments are publicly available — whether congressional Republicans are willing to read them or not.
Schmitt added during his “Meet the Press” interview that he wants to see “accountability,” not against Trump for allegedly breaking the law, but against those who charged Trump for allegedly breaking the law.
In other words, the GOP senator sees law enforcement as the bad guys in this story, and the defendant as the victim. Keep this in mind if/when the incoming president starts targeting Smith’s colleagues early next year.
