After being much maligned by MAGA for leading criminal cases against Donald Trump (until he returned to the presidency), Jack Smith is finally striking back.
Earlier this month, the Office of Special Counsel heeded Republican Senator Tom Cotton’s call to launch a Hatch Act investigation into the former special counsel, on the allegation that Smith’s efforts to prosecute Trump for mishandling classified documents and conspiring to overturn the 2020 election constituted “unprecedented interference in the 2024 election.”
Smith’s lawyers responded with a withering three-page letter to the OSC, published Tuesday by The New York Times, in which they defended Smith’s integrity and skewered Cotton’s allegations.
“The predicate for this investigation is imaginary and unfounded,” the lawyers wrote, as many of Cotton’s purported findings of wrongdoing amounted to “routine,” court-approved actions—such as requesting to exceed the 45-page limit for opening motions, proposing a trial date roughly five months after a grand jury indictment, and seeking expedited review by an appeals court.
Such “unremarkable examples,” the lawyers wrote, were in keeping with the typical duties of a prosecutor.
And while Cotton accused Smith of circumventing standard legal processes in his unsuccessful attempt to bypass a lower court and get the Supreme Court to rule on presidential immunity, Smith’s lawyers pointed out that this decision was backed by precedent in “the most analogous prior case,” i.e., the United States v. Nixon case related to Watergate.
Thus, the lawyers wrote, the OSC investigation is “premised on a partisan complaint that suggests the ordinary operation of the criminal justice system should be disrupted by the whims of a political contest. But the notion that justice should yield to politics is antithetical to the rule of law.”
The post “Imaginary and Unfounded”: Jack Smith Finally Hits Back at MAGA appeared first on New Republic.
