Thursday, 3 August 2023

What is Smith’s Trump indictment referring to?

 Special Counsel Jack Smith added new indictments against Donald Trump, among them conspiratorially “unlawfully discounting  legitimate votes.” Was Smith here referencing Stacy Abrams who for years claimed she was the real governor of Georgia, barnstorming the country to overturn the vote count?

Or maybe Smith referred to ex-president Jimmy Carter? He “discounted” the 2016 vote by claiming Trump won only due to the “Russians”? Or did Smith mean Hillary Clinton who discounted Trump as an “illegitimate” president, prompting her to join the “Resistance” against an elected president?

Or maybe Smith meant the Hollywood crowd who cut commercials after the 2016 election, begging viewers to pressure the electors to refuse their constitutional duties to honor their states’ popular vote, and instead in insurrectionary fashion vote for Hillary Clinton?

Or was Smith thinking of the 32 Democratic House members and Sen. Barbara Boxer in January 2005 who tried to toss out the legally certified vote in Ohio to swing the election to John Kerry?

Or maybe Smith was referencing Molly Ball’s 2021 Time essay? She bragged of the 2020 “cabal” and “conspiracy” hatched by Democrats, Silicon Valley, and corporatists to spend half-a-billion  dollars to change state voting laws, censor the news, modulate the 2020 street protests, and absorb the work of state precinct workers?

Thanks @VDHanson

@JonathanTurley says

Special Counsel Jack Smith just issued the first criminal indictment of alleged disinformation in my view. If you take a red pen to all of the material presumptively protected by the First Amendment, you can reduce much of the indictment to haiku...