For Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors, Donald Trump’s election victory meant one thing: They would have little choice but to conclude their pending criminal cases against the Republican president-elect. It wasn’t because they didn’t have evidence against the defendant, but because the Justice Department has a longstanding policy that says a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.
With this in mind, Smith and his office began taking steps to dismiss the charges against Trump before his inauguration. However, the developments appear to have caused some confusion in Republican circles. The New York Times reported:
Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, has argued — echoed in recent days by other Trump allies — that dropping the charges “amounts to an admission that these were just politicized lawsuits from the start.”
The line was unintentionally funny. On Monday afternoon, Philip Bump of The Washington Post wrote online: “A good test of how stupid someone is is to claim that Smith’s motion proves the charges were politically motivated.” Just half an hour later, Lee published a post of his own saying, “The only thing that has changed is that Trump won the election. And now Jack wants to fire Smith. Doesn’t that amount to an acknowledgment that this was simply politicized legal practice from the start?”
In other words, the Utah Republican expected the public to believe that Smith filed a case against Trump before the election; the special counsel took steps to drop the charges after the election; and this necessary sequence suggests that the prosecutor’s efforts were politically motivated.
To be honest, I am not a mind reader. I have no idea whether Lee was making a sincere but misguided point, or whether he was merely pretending to be foolish out of a cynical belief that many Americans will believe nonsense.
In any case, to the extent that reality still makes any sense, there is literally no reason to believe that Smith and the special counsel’s office wanted these cases to end. Hearing Lee tell it, Smith essentially concluded, “Well, Trump won, so I guess there’s no point in prosecuting him anymore.”
However, that is absurd. Smith and his team did everything they could to hold Trump accountable for his many alleged crimes. They wrap up, not because they have lost interest, but because their hands are tied. As Glenn Thrush of the Times summarized online, in a message addressed to Lee: “All our reporting (and that of others) indicates that Smith and [Justice Department officials] believe – at this moment – that Trump has committed crimes and that failure to prosecute him threatens the rule of law.”
If the senior Utah senator is looking for evidence of “politicized justice” – evidence that Republicans have tried in vain for years – he will have to look elsewhere.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
