Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment is a
case within a case, a prosecutorial enchilada
filled with things for people of all political
persuasions to hate. The outside is a shell of a
conventional conspiracy prosecution, and these
parts are genuinely damaging for Donald Trump.
Inside, it’s a deranged authoritarian fantasy,
at times reading more like a 45-page Louise
Mensch tweet than an indictment.
This radical core is somehow scarier than the
allegations against Trump and
co-conspirators like Rudy Giuliani, John
Eastment, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, and
Kenneth Cheeseboro. Despite early criticism
describing the case as entirely about protected
speech, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s case
does focus on some overt acts, and these
sections are buttressed by witnesses who could
be convincing across the spectrum.
Former Arizona Speaker of the House and
onetime Trump supporter Rusty Bowers will
describe being asked not to certify the results
by, among others, Trump and Giuliani. Ronna
McDaniel, chair of the RNC, will say she was
told votes by so-called “fraudulent electors”
would only be deployed if election litigation
was successful. Former Vice President Mike
Pence, who is rumored to be running for
president and took instant advantage of
indictment news Tuesday (see below), will
testify Trump told him, “You’re too honest,” in
response to prods to refuse to certify the
outcome.
If Smith simply focused on those damaging
episodes in states like Arizona, Michigan, and
Georgia, or on Trump’s interactions with Pence,
this prosecution would be an easier sell to the
general population. Instead, Smith has tried to
pen a Unified Field Theory of insurrection that
would massively expand the meaning of concepts
like incitement to include false statements,
tweets, and other forms of protected speech,
down to classic Trumpisms like “I don’t care
about a link… I have a much better link,” and “I
have a lot of friends in Detroit… Detroit is
totally corrupt.”
In fact, if rumors are true and the four
counts filed by Smith this week are later
complemented by a superseding indictment, this
document may end up expanding the definition of
“seditious conspiracy” to include those things
as well. As Adam Kinzinger
said this week, he hoped additional counts
will hold Trump “accountable” for all the
actions of January 6th.
It’s not hard to read this and see the
framework of an argument that Trump’s ideas,
tweets and “knowingly false statements” were
elements of the same conspiracy to “violently
disrupt” the election for which people like Oath
Keepers Elmer Stewart Rhodes and Kelly Meggs
have already
been convicted and sentenced to 18 and 12
years in prison, respectively. A successful
prosecution would fold space and time to make
legal speech felony violence.
If the “falsifying
business records” case in Manhattan
involving a payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels
felt like one “offense” stretched to 34 counts,
Smith’s January 6th indictment seems like 20-30
discrete scenes rolled out as a single
conspiracy. In no particular order, here are
three bizarre elements of Smith’s vision:
The mood police.
In the opening passages of the indictment
Smith rails against Trump’s “knowingly false
statements,” saying they created an “intense
national atmosphere of mistrust and anger,”
intended to “erode public faith in the
administration of the election.” I thought I was
having an acid flashback when I read this
passage. Instead of focusing on overt acts in
the individual states, episodes which clearly
make even some Trump supporters nervous, the
prosecutors are after bigger game. They want to
argue that by spreading “lies” Trump created an
“atmosphere of mistrust and anger” that, by the
end, they will argue led to the “violent”
“attack” on the Capitol. This argument brings in
fairly anodyne Trump tweets, like “Big protest
in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be
wild!”, or “Our country has had enough, they
won’t take it anymore!”, and ties it to the
crowd’s “Send it Back!” chants, its “steady,
violent advancement” toward Capitol doors, and
scenes of crowd members “violently attacking law
enforcement.”
The Supreme Court in 1969 heard a landmark
case,
Brandenburg v. Ohio, that set an
extremely high bar for government intervention
in speech cases, making the standard “likely to
incite or produce… imminent lawless action.” A
tweeting campaign that begins in November and
produces a general “atmosphere of mistrust and
anger” that by January works a protesting crowd
into a lather is exactly the kind of behavior
Brandenburg says is not illegal. In
fact, Brandenburg goes further and says
“mere advocacy” of the use of force, even
advocacy of the forcible overthrow of
government, is not illegal. The speech has to be
likely to produce “imminent” lawless action to
be considered illegal. But Smith wants to
criminalize the creation of the “atmosphere of
mistrust,” and/or the intent to “erode public
faith” in officialdom.
The definition of “knowingly
false.”
In the relentless, redundant style of an
MSNBC broadcast or a Washington Post
editorial — Smith’s prose in places definitely
reads more like moral-clarity-era journalism
than law — the prosecutor repeatedly mentions
“knowingly false claims.” From a language
standpoint alone, it’s wild stuff, like an
exercise in how many times one can say the same
thing in a handful of lines. In the second
paragraph for instance Smith describes how Trump
“spread lies” that were “false, and [Trump] knew
they were false,” and repeated them even though
they were “knowingly false claims.”
Smith in other words makes Trump’s state of
mind central to the indictment. Even the New
York Times markup of the document notes
that “proving Mr. Trump’s mindset may be a key
element to all the charges.” Therefore the
craziest part of this document is the section
beginning on page 6, called “The Defendant’s
Knowledge of the Falsity of His Election Fraud
Claims.”
One would expect that proof Trump was
“knowingly” lying and didn’t really believe the
election had been stolen from him would be
something like an email to Giuliani saying, “I
know this is bull, but let’s try it anyway!”, or
testimony from a confederate that Trump admitted
in private that he knew he lost. There are bits
and pieces of this kind of argument in the text,
but Smith leads with a different argument: that
Trump had been “notified repeatedly” by people
who were “best positioned to know the facts” yet
“deliberately disregarded” what he’d been told.
Smith then goes on to list these “best
positioned” people: Pence, “senior leaders of
the Justice Department,” the Director of
National Intelligence, the “Department of
Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and
Infrastructure Security Agency” (CISA), “senior
White House attorneys,” and others.
Smith is going to try to define “knowingly
false” as a statement made in defiance of what
one has been told by people “best positioned” to
know the facts. Once you’ve been told X
by the right people, going on to insist Y
anyway will be defined as a “knowing” falsehood.
This concept is deployed over and over. In
another section, Trump cites the infamous “State
Farm Arena” video, which his team insisted
showed evidence of vote fraud in Atlanta.
However, Smith says, “Justice Officials
specifically refuted” the video, telling them
what they were looking at was “benign.” Which
may be true, but this is how Smith is trying to
prove state of mind: your claim has been
“specifically refuted,” you persisted in saying
it, therefore it’s a knowing falsehood. Unless
I’m missing something, they’re aiming to prove
intent without introducing evidence of Trump’s
thoughts, which seems bananas.
Trial by “harm.”
After Trump “maligned a Philadelphia City
Commissioner” for stating there was no evidence
of fraud, Smith noted that “as a result, the
Philadelphia City Commissioner and his family
received death threats.” There are two of these
passages, and Smith seemingly doesn’t feel the
need to prove causation in either, using this
“Trump said things and as a result
threats happened” without listing how the one
affected the other, or showing that Trump knew
his speech would result in threats, etc.
This goes back to the first problem,
redefining incitement as something generalized
and broad. Again, in Brandenburg, the
court specifically ruled that lines like “Bury
the n—” couldn’t be construed as incitement, yet
here’s Smith arguing that Trump
mean-tweeting former Philadelphia City
Commissioner Al Schmidt by saying he was
“being used big time by the fake news media” was
an element of a crime because threats resulted.
This is very similar to the logic we saw in
the Twitter Files, when executives at the
company formerly known as Twitter decided that
while individual Trump tweets on January 6th
weren’t violative, they could be struck under a
new definition of incitement that included the
so-called “context surrounding.” Bari Weiss
showed that executives using this theory could
look at the entire history of Trump statements,
the reactions to the same, and conclude that
phrases like “American Patriots” or “They will
not be disrespected” could be understood as “coded
incitement to violence.”
Smith is doing the same thing. He’s
taking statements that weren’t even against
Twitter’s terms of service and arguing
they’re part of a criminal conspiracy, using
the same thinking that Twitter deployed in
creating “coded incitement.” Instead of
drawing the most specific, clearest of lines
to describe incitement — “Go hit that dude
with a rock” — this crop of prosecutors
wants to create the broadest definition
possible, holding Trump responsible for an
“atmosphere” of “anger” that at best
arguably inspires violent crowd behavior
weeks or months later.
A future superseding indictment could link
Trump’s felony case to the
seditious conspiracy convictions already
handed down. Those cases, if you go back and
look, introduced as evidence that the Oath
Keepers used “encrypted communications
applications like Signal.” So false statements,
private gatherings, and words that “erode” trust
in government could end up defined as elements
of felony conspiracy, maybe even sedition.
That’s a concept that would make John Adams or
Mitchell Palmer blush.
This prosecution puts Americans in the same
conundrum they’ve been in since the beginning of
the Trump years: forced once again to choose
between a serial line-crosser and more or less
open gangster on one hand, and a gang of
never-Trump lawfare aficionados who’d like to
revive the Alien and Sedition Acts on the other.
As Woody Allen put it, “Let us pray we have the
wisdom to choose correctly.” Are you excited
yet?
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