If this is the Democrats’ best “October Surprise,” former President Donald Trump doesn’t sound surprised at all.
After special counsel Jack Smith won permission from a federal judge to release his indictment of the former president to the public on Wednesday, Trump wasted no time branding the move “election interference” by a prosecutor who’s spared no effort to try to keep Trump from winning office again.
And he’s got some top legal minds making the same case.
“This was a weaponization of government, and that’s why it was released 30 days before the election,” Trump told NewsNation’s correspondent Ali Bradley on Wednesday during an interview in Houston.
The goal wasn’t legal, he said, it was political — a deliberate effort to aid Vice President Kamala Harris’ bid to succeed President Joe Biden in the White House.
“It’s pure election interference to get an incompetent person like Kamala — she’s grossly incompetent, she’s more incompetent than Biden — to get these people elected,” Trump said.
The Trump campaign, on the social media platform X, published video of part of the interview:
PRESIDENT TRUMP: “He’s a deranged person. I call him deranged Jack Smith. He just lost the big ‘documents’ case… it was a total victory in Florida… he works for Kamala and he works for Joe. This was a weaponization of government and that’s why it was released 30 days before… pic.twitter.com/TAEzsmURIm
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 3, 2024
The release of the indictment came a day after the vice presidential debate between Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Democratic Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — a debate Vance dominated.
It also comes in the wake of Trump’s sweeping victory over Smith July 1 in the Supreme Court presidential immunity case and District Judge Aileen Cannon’s July 15 decision to dismiss charges against Trump in Florida related to his handling of classified documents after his presidency.
Cannon, taking a cue from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the immunity case, ruled that Smith was not properly appointed in the first place, as The Associated Press reported. That leaves only his election interference case against Trump in D.C. Circuit Court.
In a series of posts on X, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley — an outspoken critic of Smith — called Wednesday’s move by Smith and District Judge Tonya Chutkan an effort to “thread the needle” of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision while still going public with damaging charges against a political candidate “despite Justice Department policies that encourage prosecutors to avoid acts that would be viewed as trying to influence an election…”
At the conservative website National Review, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy — no fan of Trump in most circumstances — described the move to make the indictment public as even better for Democrats politically than a trial would be.
Should Jack Smith’s case against Trump be dismissed?
Yes: 99% (746 Votes)
No: 1% (7 Votes)
McCarthy wrote:
“So no, the prosecutor and judge cannot get the case to trial, as they so ardently hoped to do; but Smith has been given the best substitute he can hope for: A book-length recitation of the case against Trump, injected into public record and thus into the campaign less than five weeks before Election Day — and while people are already voting.” (Italics in the original.)
“In some ways, even though no conviction will result from it, Smith’s public submission is better than a trial,” McCarthy continued.
“Trials are messy and unpredictable; prosecutors’ written descriptions of what they hope to prove are often compelling and damning. That is why, at a trial, the judge routinely instructs the jury that an indictment and proffers by a prosecutor are only allegations; they are not evidence, they are not subject to cross-examination, and they prove nothing. Here, by contrast, there will be no cautionary instructions. Smith’s allegations will be used by Democrats and repeated by the media as if they are established fact, the conclusions of a searching, exacting probe by a Justice Department special counsel.”
In a post on the social media platform TruthSocial, Trump made the same points he made to NewsNation — but with upper-case clarity:
“The release of this falsehood-ridden, Unconstitutional, J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous Debate performance, and 33 days before the Most Important Election in the History of our Country, is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine and Weaponize American Democracy, and INTERFERE IN THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION,” he wrote.
“Deranged Jack Smith, the hand picked Prosecutor of the Harris-Biden DOJ, and Washington, D.C. based Radical Left Democrats, are HELL BENT on continuing to Weaponize the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power.”
Trump told NewsNation that the attempts to influence the election — by Democrats, by Smith, and other actors — are too obvious to be taken at face value, by anyone.
“The people know it, I know it, everybody knows it,” the former president said.
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