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‘We are not living in a sane age’: Trump DOJ official removed from indictment blasts Jack Smith

August 28, 2024 | | Print Article

A former Department of Justice official is lashing out at Jack Smith after he was removed from the original copy of the indictment against former President Donald Trump.

The official, Jeffrey Clark, struck out at special counsels on X after a revised copy of the indictment deleted him as “co-conspirator No. 4,” bringing the indictment in line with a recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity.

“Let me borrow a point from Justice Scalia’s dissent in Morrison v Olson and apply it to the current Jack Smith-Trump situation,” he wrote. “One problem Scalia spotted with Independent Counsels (and the same problem applies to Special Counsels) is that they are given only one man or woman to target. This inherently makes them like Lavrenty Beria of the Soviet Union (show me the man and I’ll find you the crime). An Independent or Special Counsel isn’t looking across the field at other potential targets and having to prioritize how to focus his limited resources.”

“Instead, Independent and Special Counsels can wield functionally unlimited budgets,” Clark continued. “In a saner age and with use of only a Non-Independent/Non-Special Counsel, after the failed assassination attempt on Trump, an ordinary prosecutor thinking about the national interest might say to him or herself: Let me drop this hyper-political case and help the Nation heal. People can go to the ballot box. That is enough. But an Independent Counsel (now defunct, but I’m making/applying Scalia’s conceptual point) or a Special Counsel has no incentive to drop cases *even after a national trauma like an assassination attempt.* No, such a targeted counsel is incentivized by the very design of his office to keep going after the target until the target or the prosecutor is no more or until the courts call a halt to the prosecution(s).”

“And that was one of the most powerful reasons for why the whole device of setting up dedicated prosecutors and making them go after singular targets is unconstitutional. Just the picture below should have led to dropped cases against Trump about political disputes during an election season. But we are not living in a sane age and we are no longer in a country that restricts the means of legal battle only to what is constitutional. That’s one reason we call it ‘Lawfare,'” he concluded.

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Sierra Marlee
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