Jack Smith Takes Hard-Line Stance on Cameras in Trump's Federal Election Trial
Special prosecutor Jack Smith already has the audience he wants.
When he brings former President Donald Trump to trial in a Washington courtroom, he’ll have a judge who’s already decided the case. He’ll have a jury chosen from an electorate that voted virtually unanimously in favor of President Joe Biden in 2020.
So when it comes to giving the American people a look at the election interference trial of the 45th president, and efforts to hold Trump responsible for the Capitol incursion of Jan. 6, 2021, Smith took his stand.
In a court filing Friday, the attack-dog prosecutor attacked an effort by establishment media organizations to televise Trump’s trial in a Washington, D.C., circuit court.
Smith argued that cameras are already prohibited in federal courtrooms and that it would be necessary to uphold the rule in this case to ensure a “fair trial” and the “fair administration of justice.”
(One phrase or the other is sprinkled throughout the filing — under the apparent theory that if something’s repeated often enough, it will sound true.)
But no one who’s followed Smith’s pursuit of Trump with even mild interest will believe he has anything like a fair trial in mind — no more than his Democratic masters in the Department of Justice.
And it’s worth remembering that Smith has already been castigated by no less an authority than the Supreme Court of the United States — which unanimously dismissed the convictions he won in 2014 against Bob McDonnell, the high-profile former Republican governor of Virginia, and McDonnell’s then-wife, Maureen.
When the high court tossed the convictions, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Smith had prosecuted the McDonnells in a way that was “inconsistent with both text and precedent” of the law.
Maybe so, but Smith got his conviction from a jury that deliberated over three days, according to a CBS News report from September 2014.
Now Smith is prosecuting Donald Trump, a man who garnered the votes of nearly 74 million Americans in 2020 — even after a four-year campaign of calumny from a hideously biased mainstream media and a political opposition party that long ago lost all sense of both principles and proportion, aided by an FBI and deep state that had declared a covert war against the commander in chief.
The American people knew damned well in 2020 that the assaults on Trump had been baseless, whether it was the “Steele dossier” or the “Russia collusion” hoax or the sham impeachment that deserves to go down in infamy as one of the darkest periods of American political history.
And as the political overkill of Trump prosecutions rolls on — cases that range from merely weak to absurdly, revoltingly, and disgracefully weak — the American people know it now. It’s not an accident that even a New York Times/Sienna poll published Sunday showed Trump leading Biden in swing states Biden won in 2020.
Smith doesn’t need the American people watching his travesty of a trial in Washington.
He has Judge Tanya Chutkan, a woman whose partisanship and distaste for Trump isn’t even concealed when it comes to cases related to the Capitol incursion.
He has the Washington, D.C., voter rolls to choose a jury — 92 percent of the District went for Biden in 2020. For a Democratic prosecutor in a Trump case, nothing looks more like America than a population of federal bureaucrats, unionized public employees and special interest grifters, grunting and snuffling at the public trough.
In their requests to have the Trump trial televised, according to CNN, a group of media organizations operating together sought an exemption to the ban on cameras in federal courtrooms based on the historical significance of the case.
In a separate petition, according to CNN, NBCUniversal Media argued that the ban on cameras itself is outdated and needs to be lifted as a violation of the First Amendment.
Trump’s defense team, meanwhile, has not taken an official position on cameras, according to The Washington Post. However, one of Trump’s attorneys, John Lauro, has publicly suggested they be part of the case, according to Politico.
Smith, naturally, took a hard line against that idea.
Televising the proceedings would get in the way of a “fair trial” and the “fair administration of justice,” Smith argued, presumably keeping a straight face while he wrote.
The reality is, he has his audience, and he aims to keep it.
As far as the Democratic Party’s leaders are concerned — and probably Smith himself — when it comes to the prosecutions of Donald Trump, the American people know too damn much already.
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