Supreme Court leaves Trumps insurrection case on life support and indicts the Justice Department
Even the Democratic deus ex machina is having a bad stretch. No matter how favorable the presidential race has looked for Donald Trump, there’s always been the possibility that special counsel Jack Smith would get to trial with his Jan.6 case before the election and, at the very least, dominate the news cycle for weeks and, in all likelihood, convict Trump in a case involving more serious matters than hush money to a porn star. Now that Joe Biden stumbled so badly in the first presidential debate, lawfare is more important than ever to Democrats, but Smith’s J6 case is hanging by a thread. Democrats blame the Supreme Court, which has undercut Smith in two new decisions.In the belief that what the situation requires is a futile and stupid gesture, Rep.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she’s going to file articles of impeachment against conservative justices. Yet it is Smith who has forced novel and sensitive legal issues to the fore.The Biden Justice Department and Democrats may believe that it’s the role of the Supreme Court to expedite a politically motivated, legally dubious prosecution of a major-party presidential candidate prior to a national election, but it’s not. Because what Smith is doing is unprecedented, it has raised questions that haven’t been answered before — such as, you know, whether a former president of the United States can be prosecuted at all. If the Biden Justice Department wanted such questions decided well before the 2024 election, it needed to indict Trump earlier than August 2023. As it is, Smith has been in a race against the clock because the political usefulness of his prosecution disappears after Election Day 2024 and if Trump wins, the prosecution itself goes away.This means that Smith, against Justice Department guidelines, is conducting his prosecution on a political timetable. The Supreme Court just made his hope to get the case to a jury sometime soon much harder by concluding that presidents have immunity for...