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Showing Original Post only (View all)Jack Smith comes to Merrick Garland's defense [View all]
A common sentiment on the left is that Garland was too deferential to Trump after Joe Biden took office and failed to unleash the full might of the department on the former president for nearly two years. The delay, critics say, made it much more difficult for Smith once he was appointed in November 2022 to bring Trump to trial before the 2024 election.
But Smiths report emphasized that the Justice Department was aggressively investigating leads related to Trump long before the special counsels tenure began. Litigation tactics by Trump and his allies, Smith argued, were the key factors that slowed the process to a crawl.
...It took Smith more than a year to obtain text messages between Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Trump DOJ official Jeffrey Clark. And the department spent months fighting to access communications of John Eastman, a lawyer who helped devise Trumps last-ditch efforts to remain in power.
The most protracted battles of all stemmed from Trumps broad invocation of executive privilege to try to prevent witnesses from providing evidence, Smith wrote. It took months of secretive legal proceedings to secure testimony from Trump White House aides such as Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino and Pat Cipollone. Former Vice President Mike Pence also resisted testifying until a court ordered him to reveal some but not all details about his interactions with Trump. Smith noted that judges broadly rejected Trumps privilege claims, with one holding that he was engaged in an obvious effort to delay the investigation.
Smith also drew attention to what may have been his biggest foil: the Supreme Court. He pointed out that the justices rebuffed his effort to put Trumps presidential immunity claims on a similar timetable to the one the court adopted five decades earlier in litigation over Watergate and President Richard Nixons tapes.
And Smith argued that the Supreme Courts resolution of Trumps immunity assertion essentially guaranteed another round of litigation that would have been all but certain to return to the justices if Trump had not won the election and the prosecution had continued.
read: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/14/jack-smith-special-counsel-report-takeaways-00198252
...good reading for the reality-based community which has had to endure spurious claims about what was essentially a secret investigation and prosecution which only revealed its intentions in court, advantaging the reticence of DOJ to explain or defend their actions while the cases were still ongoing.
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I don't know. While I appreciate Smith's defense of Garland, I still despise the way he handled the whole thing, after
SWBTATTReg
Jan 14
#3
Well, good. I don't think Garland deserves any defending, and IMHO, he's going to be defending his calls for years and
SWBTATTReg
Jan 14
#6
you must have forgotten that the maga majority on the SC is at the end of any series of certain appeals
bigtree
Jan 14
#10
Walk us through exactly how a trial could have been "forced" to happen before the election
Fiendish Thingy
Jan 14
#19
I think what it shows is the weakness in our justice system, that the processes can be dragged out ad nauseum. What is
Evolve Dammit
Jan 14
#15
A LOT of cases in our justice system take years if defendants can afford counsel that
ancianita
Jan 14
#23
I will continue to complain about cases that should have been brought that didn't happen. Especially when the stakes
Evolve Dammit
Jan 15
#36
Smith can cover for Garland all he wants, and I haven't read the article at the link ...
aggiesal
Jan 14
#20