WSJ Columnist Points Out the Obvious Flaw in Jack Smith's J6 Indictment Against Trump

  Matt Vespa Aug 04, 2023  

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A federal indictment of former President Donald Trump on charges pertaining to his ham-fisted contestation of the 2020 presidential election and the subsequent Jan. 6, 2021 jamboree at the U.S. Capitol was all but a foregone conclusion, and Department of Justice-appointed special counsel Jack Smith delivered the goods on Tuesday. In a 45-page sham indictment of the 45th president's post-2020 Election Day conduct, President Joe Biden's hatchet man argued for a ludicrously broad view of fraud and criminal conspiracy, a chilling view of free speech and a dystopian view of the attorney-client relationship. With its unprecedented politicization of the rule of law and brazen siccing of the federal prosecutorial apparatus on a leading partisan foe, the Biden Regime has made explicit that which should have already been obvious: The Regime wants a presidential rematch against Trump next fall.

Smith's much-anticipated four-count indictment paints Trump as the focal point of a sprawling criminal conspiracy to reverse the results of the 2020 election. Under Smith's theory of the case, Trump and his six "co-conspirators" directed a national effort to sow doubt about various states' Election Day results and galvanize Republican-held state legislatures to submit competing slates of Electoral College electors, culminating in the intense pressure placed upon former Vice President Mike Pence to reject various state' slates of electors on Jan. 6. But if Trump earnestly believed the 2020 election was stolen due to rampant fraud, then his attempts to direct his Department of Justice to work with the afflicted states to submit for consideration alternative slates of electors was justifiable; in fact, if he truly subjectively believed fraud on that great of a scale had occurred, one could plausibly argue his constitutional oath of office required such actions.

Smith's move to get around this is to argue, based on nothing more than secondhand remarks, that Trump subjectively knew the 2020 election was not, in fact, stolen. But no matter how many different names of lawyers Smith trots out who apparently told Trump that he had in fact lost the election, it will be near-impossible for Smith to prove that Trump actually, deep down, knew he lost. It is entirely possible, for instance, that for every 99 people in his orbit who told him he lost, Trump chose to believe the one person who told him that he had really won; confirmation bias is real, and Trump is well known for taking the advice of the most recent person he happened to have spoken with. Smith's attempted criminalization of Trump's free speech right to push for competing slates of electors is also laughable when considering that various Democratic officials tried precisely the same thing — submitting alternative slates of electors by sowing doubt about the integrity of a presidential election in certain states — after George W. Bush's presidential victories in 2000 and 2004, as well as Trump's own presidential victory in 2016.

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