We Know Who’s to Blame for Trump’s Evasion of Justice. It Isn’t Jack Smith.
None of this was inevitable.
By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, SLATE
The six-page filing that special counsel Jack Smith submitted Monday is surely one of the strangest requests a federal prosecutor has ever had to make. Smith moved to dismiss charges against Donald Trump for election subversion, asking Judge Tanya Chutkan to toss out the case due to an “unprecedented circumstance”: The defendant has, of course, been reelected president. In the filing, he assures the judge (and the public) that the government “stands fully behind” the “gravity of the crimes charged,” “the merits of the prosecution,” and “the strength of the government’s proof.” The one teeny problem is that the defendant is about to reenter the office that he is accused of criminally abusing just four years ago (the exact subject of the doomed indictment). So, according to Smith, Trump is clearly guilty of multiple felonies—and constitutionally immune from prosecution for those felonies, in the view of the Justice Department.