In theory, as special counsel Jack Smith prepares to drop his criminal cases against Donald Trump, Republicans should celebrate his impending departure, wave goodbye and hope the public forgets the voluminous evidence he has amassed against the newly elected president.
In practice it doesn’t quite work that way.
On Friday, two top House Republicans — House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and House Administration Subcommittee Chairman Barry Loudermilk — sent Smith a letter demanding he preserve documents as part of a GOP investigation into his research. Shortly afterwards, conspiratorial billionaire Elon Musk, who supplemented the correspondence between Jordan and Loudermilk, added: “Jack Smith’s abuse of the justice system cannot go unpunished.”
That same day, a member of Trump’s team sent a warning shot via The Washington Post, saying the newly elected president would “react extremely poorly” if the special counsel took any more public action. The unnamed adviser added in a comment to the Post that the next Justice Department will take a “critical” look at what Smith’s team has done in recent years to “ensure something like this never happens again.”
I’m not even sure what that means. The special prosecutor and his team were assigned to investigate a criminal. They discovered extensive evidence of wrongdoing, presented the evidence before a grand jury, secured indictments, and filed charges. Team Trump wants to “ensure something like this never happens again”? That’s the kind of sentence that suggests the new Trump administration will be at least as hostile to the rule of law as the first administration, if not more so.
But two days after Jordan sent new demands to Smith, he also opened an interesting door. NBC News reported:
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said Sunday that he and his Republican colleagues in the House are “not taking anything off the table” regarding the investigation into special counsel Jack Smith.
When CNN’s Dana Bash asked the right-wing congressman several times on “State of the Union” if he planned to call Smith to testify, Jordan would not answer directly. However, the Ohio Republican said, “That’s been the norm, but we’re not taking anything off the table. We can’t say for sure, but we want the information.”
Jordan is not alone. The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus explained in her latest column that Trump adviser Mike Davis has raised the prospect of various forms of legal jeopardy for Smith.
“There should be several investigations: the House of Representatives judiciary, the Senate judiciary, the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility and a criminal investigation,” he told The Post. Davis added during a Newsmax interview that Smith “should go to prison for involvement in a criminal conspiracy against President Trump.”
Clearly, the offensive against the special prosecutor is quite insane, and there is literally no evidence that the accused criminal is the hero of this story, while the prosecutor is the villain.
But what the right may not fully appreciate is the direction Democrats prefer.
On the surface, it appears that Democrats want to avoid another partisan spectacle in which Republican members of Congress yell at the special counsel for hours while Trump appointees harass Smith and his team. But just beneath the surface, a different kind of dynamic comes into focus.
Shan Wu, legal analyst and former federal prosecutor, wrote a good piece about this for MSNBC. “Investigations conducted by Congress… can be a double-edged sword for Republicans,” Wu explained. “An investigation into this case will include testimony and disclosure of that evidence that Jordan and Loudermilk wish to preserve. Such a proceeding may not be what Trump wants, as it places a renewed focus on actions that have resulted in dozens of criminal charges against him at both the federal and state levels.”
Absolutely right. Smith apparently won’t get the chance to take his criminal cases to trial, but there may still be an opportunity for him and his team to share their findings – perhaps through a final special counsel report, through testimony in Congress, or both.
Democrats don’t want Republican scrutiny of Smith to end, they want it to continue indefinitely, with as much public discussion as possible about the many crimes Trump is accused of.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
