How fitting if in the end the only person criminalized for January 6 is . . . Jack Smith. The special prosecutor.
Of course some 1500 people were convicted for violent crimes committed that day. But Trump’s pardons voided those verdicts. Trump himself was initially charged as the center of the conspiracy to steal the presidency. Also for his stealing classified documents. He curses out Jack Smith, the prosecutor, as “deranged” and a “criminal” who should himself be prosecuted. Trump’s Department of “Justice” will no doubt cook up a case.
Laying the groundwork, the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Jim Jordan, called Smith to testify. “Our investigation,” Smith stated there, “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity.” And tried to silence and intimidate potential witnesses against him. Much of the evidence actually came from Republicans who’d voted for Trump.
But every Republican in that hearing lambasted Smith as some rogue prosecutor acting improperly for partisan motives, as “election interference.” They’ve long been screaming about “weaponization” of the machineries of justice. Trump now deems this the worst such case in all history!
Reality: the Biden Justice Department, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, desperate to avoid any whiff of politics, dithered for two years before belatedly appointing the special prosecutor. That inexcusable delay was the true miscarriage of justice here, enabling Trump to get off the hook; the cases had to be abandoned when he was elected again, due to a Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president (something not in the Constitution). Had the cases gone to trial, conviction would have been highly likely.
Also reality: Trump lost the 2020 election (for obvious reasons). Even his toady Attorney General Barr said so. Every lawsuit seeking to overturn the results was thrown out of court. An Arizona audit, conducted by Republican partisan hacks, ended by finding more Biden votes. Trump made up the “stolen election” lie from nothing only because his damaged psyche couldn’t face being a loser.*
Yet not only have Republicans made that lie gospel, but after it sparked the violence of January 6, they adopted a further gospel that that event was something innocent, not at all what we saw with our own eyes.
They even say the real criminals were those involved in the January 6 prosecutions. All have been fired. And despite Republican blather about “weaponizing” justice, it’s they who, with no sense of irony, now so blatantly weaponize it against Jack Smith and other people Trump hates. That Congressional hearing itself a perversely prime example.
Politics properly involves disagreements over principles and policy, and even differing interpretations of facts. But what we have here is something else entirely: war upon reality. Untruth has indeed become a 1984-ish core principle of this Republican regime, seen in its gaslighting about the Good and Pretti murders in Minneapolis.** Shoving those obvious lies down our throats, just to flaunt their power. This is today’s deeply sick Bizzarro Republican cult.
* Another big GOP lie was the “Russia hoax.” Russia did help Trump in the 2016 election. So did the FBI — publicizing its investigation of Clinton’s emails, but not of Trump’s Russia ties. Reopening the Clinton probe right before the election killed her candidacy.
** Calling them “domestic terrorists,” when it’s obvious the domestic terrorists are the ICE thugs.
