Jack Smith’s working on behalf of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign to jail Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election.
But Smith’s plan just hit a major stumbling block.
And Clarence Thomas dropped some bad news on Joe Biden about this key 2024 case.
Jack Smith charged Donald Trump under a cockamamie legal theory with a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States and to deny civil rights when Trump contested the 2020 election results.
Obama Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Trump’s bid to toss the charges on the grounds of presidential immunity.
Trump naturally appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court leading to Chutkan admitting she no longer has jurisdiction over the case.
Should Trump lose at the circuit court level he would appeal to the Supreme Court.
But appeals take time and they would delay the trial well past the March 4, 2024, scheduled start date.
Smith admitted the whole purpose of rushing to trial was to jail Trump in a jaw-dropping petition to the Supreme Court to take up Trump’s appeal immediately and bypass the appeals court.
In the motion to the Supreme Court, Smith admitted it was “extraordinary” to skip a step in the appeals process, but that it was in the “public interest” to try the case as quickly as possible.
The only interest served by trying Trump before the election is Joe Biden’s political interest.
That’s because a March trial allows Smith to obtain a conviction by the spring and Chutkan to sentence Trump to prison just before Labor Day and the start of the fall campaign.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy explained on Fox News that Smith’s desperation to convict Trump before the election could prove to be a massive error.
“Smith, I believe, may have fumbled into a mistake here in his haste to get the immunity issue in front of Supreme Court,” McCarthy began. “It is understandable why he wants to go fast, that has been their plan all along. The only thing he wants the Supreme Court to look at is the immunity claim. What Donald Trump has always wanted to get the case in front of the Supreme Court so they can look at the charges.”
McCarthy told host Larry Kudlow that Smith asking the court to take up the issue of immunity could lead to the justices agreeing to take up Trump’s argument that the charges against him are unconstitutional since Trump is going to end up at the Supreme Court after a conviction anyway.
The former federal prosecutor added that there were serious legal defects with the indictment against Trump and so Smith’s gambit could lead to the court exonerating Trump ahead of schedule.
“The Supreme Court never decided whether a former president has immunity from criminal prosecution for his presidential acts, but I think his charges in this case are very shaky and what Trump has always wanted is to get this case in front of the Supreme Court before the trial, because if they have a trial and he gets convicted, then the issue is ‘would the Supreme Court throw out the conviction?’ Here, I think it would just be, ‘Have a look at the charges and see if this is really legal,’” McCarthy concluded.
Smith’s claim that Trump defrauded the United States by contesting the 2020 election faces serious legal hurdles thanks to two Supreme Court opinions, one written by Clarence Thomas, that rejected prosecutors taking an expansive view of fraud statutes.
In Ciminelli v. United States, Clarance Thomas wrote for a unanimous majority, “the federal fraud statutes criminalize only schemes to deprive people of traditional property interests.”
Prosecutors sought to claim that it was illegal to defraud a victim out of relevant financial information, but the justices held that fraud statutes were limited to traditional property interests.
A second case, Percoco v. United States, saw the justices reject the theory by prosecutors that fraud statutes allowed the government to convict someone for defrauding a victim out of “honest services” and that fraud statutes required a loss of property or money.
Smith isn’t charging Trump with defrauding the United States out of money or property so under the most recent precedent, the court should toss those charges.
Likewise, Smith indicted Trump under a preposterous theory that Trump denied black Americans their civil rights by challenging the results of the election.
The statute Smith charged Trump under was originally intended to stop the Ku Klux Klan from preventing black Americans from casting a ballot.
In the 2020 election, every ballot was cast, but Trump was arguing some shouldn’t count because of fraud.
Smith demanding the Supreme Court hear Trump’s appeal on presidential immunity could be a case of “be careful what you ask for” since the court could decide to take the challenge Trump will eventually make to a conviction and throw out Smith’s case before it even starts.
And should that happen it would hand Donald Trump concrete proof that Joe Biden weaponized the Justice Department to try and jail him on sham charges because Biden didn’t think he could beat Trump fair and square in the vote.
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