For special counsel Jack Smith and his prosecutorial team, Donald Trump’s election victory meant one thing: They would have little choice but to wrap up their ongoing criminal cases against the Republican president-elect. It wasn’t because they lacked evidence against the defendant, it was because the Justice Department has a long-standing policy that says a sitting president can’t be prosecuted.
With this in mind, Smith and his office began taking steps to dismiss the charges they brought against Trump before his inauguration. The developments, however, appear to have generated some confusion in GOP circles. The New York Times reported:
Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, made the case — echoed by other Trump allies in recent days — that the withdrawal of the charges was “tantamount to an admission that this was just politicized lawfare from the beginning.”
The line was unintentionally amusing. On midday Monday, The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote online, “A good test of how dumb someone is is if they claim that Smith’s motion proves that the charges were politically motivated.” Just a half-hour later, Lee published a missive of his own that read, “All that has changed is that Trump won the election. And now Jack Smith is moving to dismiss. Isn’t that tantamount to an admission that this was just politicized lawfare from the beginning?”
In other words, the Utah Republican expected the public to believe that Smith was pursuing cases against Trump before the election; the special counsel took steps to drop the charges after the election; and this sequence necessary suggests the prosecutor’s efforts were politically motivated.
To be sure, I’m not a mind reader. I have no idea whether Lee was making a sincere but misguided point or if he was merely pretending to be foolish out of a cynical belief that many Americans will believe nonsense.
Either way, to the extent that reality still has any meaning, there’s literally no reason to believe Smith and the special counsel’s office wanted these cases to end. To hear Lee tell it, Smith effectively concluded, “Well, Trump won, so I guess there’s no point in trying to prosecute him anymore.” That, however, is absurd. Smith and his team did everything they could to hold Trump accountable for his many alleged crimes. They’re wrapping up not because they’ve lost interest, but because their hands are tied. As the Times’ Glenn Thrush summarized online, in a message directed at Lee, “All of our reporting (and that of others) indicates that Smith and [Justice Department officials] believe — right now — that Trump committed crimes and failing to prosecute him represents a threat to rule of law.” Smith was explicit on this point in this week’s court filing: “The Government’s position on the merits of the defendant’s prosecution has not changed. But the circumstances have.” If the senior senator from Utah is looking for evidence of “politicized lawfare” — evidence that Republicans have spent years trying in vain to find — he’ll have to look elsewhere.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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