Down goes Jack Smith
Special Counsel Jack Smith resigned this week, which made sense given that he was about to get ousted anyway. Smith is being widely hailed as a brave hero who went after Donald Trump as aggressively as possible but couldn’t quite take Trump down. But is that really what happened?
Even as everyone continues to place 100% of the blame on Merrick Garland in repetitive chant-like fashion, the facts continue to paint a much more complex picture. Sure, Garland could have appointed Smith sooner. But Smith was still on the job for two years. He had a responsibility to bring his indictments quickly enough to ensure that they got to trial before the election. It was such a basic fundamental responsibility that it should have been a given that this got to trial. But it didn’t happen.
A big part of that was bad luck. Jack Smith’s classified documents case against Trump was randomly assigned to corrupt Judge Aileen Cannon, which wasn’t Smith’s fault. But even once Cannon made move after move that easily could have gotten her disqualified, Jack Smith never did ask the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to remove her. Again, such a move should have been a matter of basic competence. And yet Smith never bothered.
Instead Smith seemed content to let the classified documents case wither, while belatedly bringing separate charges against Trump for January 6th – which easily could have been brought first. If Smith had moved more quickly, perhaps the Supreme Court wouldn’t have been able to help Trump stall the case until after the election.
The bottom line is that there’s nothing to suggest that Jack Smith moved any more quickly or aggressively than Merrick Garland. Neither one of them seemed to understand the legal imperative to bring these cases to trial before the election. And yet, because MSNBC (and the dozens of pundits perpetually auditioning for MSCBC guest spots with their every tweet) managed to turn “This is all Garland’s fault” into a simplistic chant, Smith has somehow evaded scrutiny entirely.
For that matter District Attorney Fani Willis, who took so long to build her case against Trump that she ended up bringing charges after Garland’s DOJ, has largely managed to avoid scrutiny even though she knew she was risking the case by having an affair with a subordinate. And of course Judge Juan Merchan has fully managed to avoid scrutiny for delaying Trump’s criminal trial sentencing hearing until after the election for no valid reason.
These people all failed us. All of their decades of combined experience and savvy and uprightness, and yet each and every one of them managed to unceremoniously crap the bed. It’s particularly infuriating that we only needed any one of them to do their jobs correctly – something that should have been a given – and yet they somehow all found a way to blow it on their end.
But that’s nothing compared to how the entire mainstream political media came together to dishonestly force an incumbent President out of the race with a hundred days to go, even while dishonestly downplaying the criminality and senility of his opponent. The media played a far more villainous role in all of this than every prosecutor and judge combined. Yet because the media is never going to hold itself accountable, the media is largely getting a free pass (or perhaps not, given how badly the media’s ratings have fallen off).
There’s a lot of blame to go around. All I ask is that we try to assign that blame in factually accurate fashion. Pretending that it was all the fault of one designated bogey man in Garland, when it was in fact a cascading series of failures on the part of numerous people across multiple branches of government, is simply absurd. Factual accuracy still matters. Jack Smith blew it in such a manner that failed the basic competency test. So did just about everyone else involved.
