Turns out Jack Smith has Donald Trump nailed all the way back to 2017
Based on the grand jury testimony that DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith has recently pulled off against Donald Trump, it’s pretty clear that Smith is close to criminally indicting Trump in relation to his classified documents scandal and January 6th. There has also been reporting that Smith is targeting Trump for wire fraud in relation to post-2020 fundraising. Now it turns out Smith has cast a much broader net.
Jack Smith has also subpoenaed the financial records of the Trump Organization’s business deals with seven foreign nations dating back to 2017, according to the New York Times. While this reporting is new, the subpoena is not. The Times says that the subpoena was issued at some unspecified time in the past.
This is yet another instance of Jack Smith investigating some aspect of Donald Trump’s crime spree and nailing him on it, and then the media and the public only find out about it after the fact. By now Smith has surely found what he was looking for. And given that Smith was apparently looking to tie Trump’s international business deals to the decisions he made as President, Trump should be very worried that Smith is looking to bring down every inch of Trump’s house of cards.
As always, keep in mind that Jack Smith – like every other prosecutor out there – knows how to read a calendar. He understands that he has to bring his charges against Trump (or at least the first round of charges) with enough time to hold a trial and get Trump convicted and imprisoned before we even get to the heart of the 2024 election cycle. Trump has a handful of legal tools at his disposal for delaying the start of any criminal trial, but those are finite in number, and a seasoned prosecutor like Smith will have also factored that into his timeframe.
So while it may feel as if Jack Smith just keeps expanding his criminal probe into new areas of Donald Trump’s life, in reality these “new” angles of investigation happened awhile back. As tends to happen in any pre-indictment criminal probe, particularly a federal one, we tend to learn about various details long after they’ve played out. Smith’s case is clearly well ahead of where the media’s reporting on Smith’s case is, because Smith is carrying out his case as secretly as possible. But once Smith indicts Trump, get ready for a floodgate of information to open about just how broad this probe has been all along.
