Jonathan Turley: The Very Special Counsel Jack Smith is Prosecuting Trump for, He Claims, Lying During a Political Campaign.
When Will He Be Prosecuting Biden for Lying About Hunter's Laptop?

It's a good question.

Jack Smith says that Trump's "lies" can be prosecuted because they were part of a scheme to "defraud the United States" -- of "confidence" in voting.

I'd point out that Joe Biden schemed to deny free speech rights to millions of Americans. His scheme wasn't just to lie about the laptop -- it was to lie about the laptop so that his his fellow conspirators could then bully social media companies into censoring Americans from spreading true news about the laptop.

His lies had a purpose -- to deprive half of the United States of their civil rights.

After last week's indictment of former President Donald Trump relating to the 2020 election, CNN declared that the charges were "personal" for President Joe Biden, who previously said Trump's words sounded like "sedition."

Of course, Trump was not charged with sedition or even seditious conspiracy. Nor was he charged with conspiracy to incitement or insurrection, the grounds for his second impeachment.

However, if Biden does view this case as personal, as CNN suggests, he might be right for the wrong reason. That's because the case being constructed against Trump by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith could prove a serious problem for Biden, too -- particularly as the basis for a House impeachment inquiry.

The latest Trump indictment, based on little new evidence and even less established law, faces a major threshold challenge under the First Amendment. Smith is seeking to criminalize what constitutes disinformation, which not only runs against the grain of the First Amendment but also prior cases. That includes United States v. Alvarez, which overturned the conviction of a politician for knowingly lying about his military background.

The Justice Department acknowledges that the Constitution protects false statements made in political campaigns. Yet it maintains that Trump can be convicted for lying because he really did not believe what he said.

And Joe Biden knew the laptop was real, but he lied about it during a national debate, and he coordinated with his partisans like former Acting CIA Director Mike Morrell to draft a lie and have 50 other "intelligence community professionals" sign that lie so that they could take it to Facebook, Twitter, and the worthless broadcast "news" companies and bully them into suppressing a perfectly true and newsworthy story.

The problem is that the effect of these lies largely fueled the actions of third parties. If Trump were accused of using fraud for pecuniary gain or of lying to federal investigators, there would be no free-speech problem. The complaint, however, focuses on the lies rather than any larceny or standalone crime. It is diffuse in saying that raising doubts over the election undermined the value or results of voting. Previous challenges have been made to certification of presidential elections with little basis (including by Democrats) and even alternative sets of electors have been submitted without criminal charges.

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There is a wicked twist in all of this for Biden. The very controversial linchpin used against Trump could conceivably be used against Biden, particularly in the launching of an impeachment inquiry by House Republicans.

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[B]iden has long been accused of knowing disregard for constitutional limitations as his administration has pushed unconstitutional measures. For example, Biden conceded that his own White House counsel and trusted legal advisers uniformly told him that renewing a national eviction moratorium would be unconstitutional -- but he listened instead to a Harvard law professor who reportedly assured him he had the authority. His eviction-ban order was quickly found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

He notes this is like the "crime" Trump committed of ignoring one set of lawyers (telling him he had no case) and indulging another set (telling him he could set aside the election).

If Biden can lawyer-shop and not face Life in Prison for it, why can't Trump?

Far more serious are the accusations facing Biden over his response to a growing corruption scandal allegedly involving his son and others. It now seems clear that Biden has lied to the public for years on critical details of the scandal. Indeed, his denial of any knowledge or involvement in his son's overseas business deals go back to the 2020 presidential debate.

Biden also denied that Hunter Biden received any money from China, which the Washington Post now declares to be manifestly untrue. For years, Biden has allowed his staff, including White House officials, to repeat his denials while opposing any further investigation.

That is why guilt by implication or association, as employed by special counsel Smith against Trump, could be a dangerous legal standard for Joe Biden.

Hunter Biden's former friend and associate, Devon Archer, told House Oversight Committee investigators last week that they were indeed selling "the brand" and that Joe Biden was part of that brand.

Ironically, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) -- who demolished Biden's defense in an earlier House hearing with two IRS agents -- repeated the same blunder during Archer's closed-door committee appearance. In the previous hearing, Goldman bizarrely raised the instance of Joe Biden going to a lunch at the Four Seasons with Hunter and his Chinese business associates.

In his own committee appearance, Archer was careful not to overstate his knowledge of demands made on then-Vice President Biden and denied personal knowledge of any. Yet Goldman refused to leave a good answer alone and plowed forward into the unknown. He noted that Archer had said they discussed "niceties" -- "Where are you, how's the weather, how's the fishing?" -- in more than 20 phone calls with the senior Biden in the presence of Hunter's foreign business partners. Goldman pressed Archer to expand, and Archer did, stating: "They were calls to talk about the weather, and that was signal enough to be powerful."

In other words, the point was the call itself -- the access -- not the content of the calls.

Later, in a media interview, Archer reaffirmed that it is "categorically false" that Joe Biden had no role in or knowledge of his son's business dealings, stating: "He was aware of Hunter's business. He met with Hunter's business partners."

An amicus brief should be submitted to the Florida judge asking just these questions, and demanding that the Very Special Counsel Jack Smith answer them.

There is never a good time for a prosecutor to get cute and invent Strange New Laws and try out exotic legal theories just to "get" someone he hates.

It is especially not the time to do that in the context of attempting to jail the current front runner to challenge the man who put Jack Smith on this prosecution.

By the way, Biden, of course, lied about not having told anyone that he wanted to see Trump prosecuted, too.

Will he be prosecuted for that?

Or will that be determined to be one of the many Legal Lies that Democrats are permitted -- nay, justified -- in telling the public?

posted by Ace at 05:03 PM

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