Special Counsel Jack Smith is poised to commit one of the largest acts of election interference in American history.
The outspoken Biden is ready to accuse the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, of conspiring against the nation he led to peace and prosperity. The J6 impeachment against Biden’s primary opponent in 2024 is set up by interference for a hapless sitting president who the American people increasingly believe is one of the most corrupt the nation has ever seen.
The grand inquisitor is expected to bring Civil War-era charges against Trump last seen during Reconstruction; that is, Section 241 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which makes it a crime for persons to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person” in the “free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege guaranteed to him by the Constitution or the laws of the United States.”
This earlier statute invokes racial overtones to defame the former president through innuendo. Congress passed the law after the Civil War with the goal of giving federal agents the means to go after white Southerners, including members of the Ku Klux Klan who committed acts of terrorism to impede the voting rights of freed slaves. It has recently been resurrected for the singular purpose of charging the J6 defendants; by extension, of course, former President Donald J. Trump.
Another looming charge, conspiracy to defraud the government, is laughable given that the US government has done nothing but defraud the American people since Donald Trump emerged as a presidential candidate. Trump was accused of colluding with Russia to win the 2016 election, an implied treason charge of which he was later exonerated. Trump was impeached as president for requesting information about former Vice President Biden’s actions in Ukraine, a request that has proven to have significant merit. In fact, then-Speaker Pelosi arguably impeached Donald Trump in search of a crime to stop any further investigation into the matter.
Most pertinently, Trump was impeached for his alleged incitement to the January 6 riots. Never mind that he told the crowd before the Capitol riots began to “make your voice heard peacefully and patriotically.” And that he told rioters to retreat to social media platforms before being banned in a transparent act of political collusion. And that the rioters themselves were penetrated by FBI agents months earlier, who subsequently did nothing to stop them. One agent even admitted via text message that there appeared to be no substantive plot to overthrow the government, as the dejected New York Times reported.
Trump was also eventually exonerated in a Senate trial. Thus, the constitutional process for adjudicating crimes and gross misdemeanors that applies to US presidents because they have sovereign immunity as head of state, i.e. impeachment, is being completely undermined in a reckless effort by the DOJ to throw spaghetti at a judicial wall to see if anything sticks.
But most interestingly, the US Supreme Court is being asked to rule on a third potential charge that applies directly to Donald Trump: obstruction of official proceedings.
A J6 defendant named Edward Lang recently filed a petition for a writ of certiorari, a type of appeal to the Supreme Court to review a lower court case. As the petition states, the SCOTUS decision “will affect dozens, if not hundreds, of prosecutions stemming from the January 6, 2021 Capitol riots.”
The writ of certiorari suggested that Lang’s appeal could affect the possible Jan. 6 Justice Department case against Trump. Lang highlighted the timing of the presentation, noting that Trump is currently a prominent figure within the Republican Party.
At the heart of the case is the alleged misapplication of 18 US Code 1512(c)(2), which refers to obstruction of official proceedings, especially with a “corrupt purpose.” Prosecutors have argued that the “corrupt purpose” is a riot, allegedly at the behest of former President Donald Trump, with the goal of the president illegally maintaining power by stalling the Electoral College.
As the legal brief notes, prosecutors have offered no plausible explanation for how the rioters temporarily obstructing the counting of Electoral College votes would lead to Donald Trump retaining office.
This, of course, exposes the illogical nature of accusing a former commander-in-chief of involvement in an “insurgency”. As we are asked to believe, President Donald Trump apparently refused to give any orders to the US military to carry out a “coup d’état” and instead led an unarmed mob into the capitol building to foment aimless chaos with no means to capture and hold the federal government.
In the movie “Knives Out,” private detective Benoit Blanc sums up the problem with the deceptively simple narrative that millionaire philanthropist Harlan Thrombey had been accidentally poisoned and had his throat cut.
“I talked to the car about the hole in the center of this doughnut,” Benoit says with a wry Southern drawl. “And yes, what you and Harlan did that fateful night seems at first glance to fill that hole perfectly. A donut hole in a donut hole. But we have to look a little closer. And when we do, we see that the donut hole has a hole in the center—it’s not a donut hole, but a smaller donut with its own hole, and our donut isn’t a hole at all!”
If you look closely at the J6 matter, it is not what the federal government did on January 6 that raises the most serious questions, it is what it did not do that defies belief. If Donald Trump were an existential threat to the country, the capital would have been flooded with members of the National Guard, rather than crawling with armed undercover agents, as was later revealed.
The serious matter of charging a former president with the crime of conspiracy, a capital offense equivalent to high treason, based fundamentally on political speech was forcefully summarized by the great French scholar Baron de Montesquieu in “Spirit of the Laws.”
“Nothing makes the crime of high treason more arbitrary than to plead guilty to it by indiscreet speech,” wrote Montesquieu. “Speech is so subject to interpretation; there is such a difference between indiscretion and malice; and there is often so little of the latter in freedom of speech, that the law can hardly put words to death, unless it expressly declares what words they are.
“Words do not constitute an open act; they remain only in the idea”, he continued. “When considered by themselves, they generally have no determinate significance; because that depends on the tone with which they are pronounced. It often happens that when repeating the same words they do not have the same meaning; this depends on its connection with other things, and sometimes more is meant by silence than by any expression. Since there can be nothing so equivocal and ambiguous as all this, how is it possible to make it a crime of high treason?
“Wherever this law is established, there is an end not only to freedom, but even to its very shadow,” he added.
This is what America is coming to terms with now with the now expected impeachment of Donald Trump on January 6th. If the former president can be impeached for his actions that day, Americans can be impeached for anything.
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OPINION: This article contains comments that reflect the opinion of the author.
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