'Bad Faith' Lawfare Continues Against President Trump

Alvin Bragg, Juan Merchan, Jack Smith, Merrick Garland and others plan to work until the bitter end to undermine the "peaceful transfer of power" the Democrats love to talk about.

So much for a peaceful transfer of power.

Despite a decisive victory representing at least a partial repudiation of the lawfare against him, President-Elect Donald Trump is spending money and time before Inauguration Day to fight politically-motivated judges and prosecutors in three criminal cases against him—an outrageous affront to American voters who elected Trump by a wide margin in November.

A New York appellate court judge just upheld Trump’s January 10 sentencing date set by Judge Juan Merchan in the business records case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in 2023. Merchan, a Democratic donor and father to the owner of a very lucrative Democratic consulting firm, is desperate to turn Trump into a convicted felon upon sentencing before he enters the White House.

Trump’s attorneys filed an application before the Supreme Court on Wednesday seeking a stay to the proceedings: Justice Sonia Sotomayor gave Bragg and Merchan until Thursday morning to respond.

Meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith confirmed in a court filing on Wednesday that Attorney General Merrick Garland is in receipt of his draft report on both former cases against Trump: the January 6 case in Washington and the so-called classified documents case in Florida.

How Do You Write a Report on Dead Cases?

After the election, Smith moved to dismiss the J6 case, which was immediately granted by Judge Tanya Chutkan. Smith then dropped his appeal of Judge Aileen Cannon’s order dismissing the documents indictment after determining Smith’s appointment violated the Constitution. Both matters are dead letters.

But that’s not stopping Smith from trying to get the last word or Garland from helping him. “The Special Counsel has already transmitted his Final Report to the Attorney General. The Final Report comprises two volumes. Volume One relates to the Special Counsel’s investigation and prosecution of President Donald Trump relating to the 2020 presidential election (Election Case). Volume Two relates to the Special Counsel’s investigation and prosecution of defendants Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, as well as President Trump, relating to mishandling of classified documents. The Attorney General intends to release Volume One to Congress and the public…and in furtherance of the public interest in informing a co-equal branch and the public regarding this significant matter,” the DOJ disclosed in a brief filed Wednesday morning. (Emphasis added.)

The DOJ was responding to an emergency motion filed earlier this week by lawyers representing Nauta and De Oliveira, two Mar-a-Lago employees charged with obstruction and other counts in the documents indictment. Although Smith dropped part of the case related to Trump, the special counsel did not drop the case against Nauta and De Oliveira. (Trump’s DOJ presumably will do so in short order.) “The Final Report promises to be a one-sided, slanted report, relying nearly exclusively on evidence presented to a grand jury and subject to all requisite protections…in order to serve a singular purpose: convincing the public that everyone Smith charged is guilty of the crimes charged,” their attorneys wrote.

So in what the DOJ pretends is prudence but in reality only sets up the Democrats’ infamous leak machine in Congress, Garland plans to allow the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees to privately view volume two of the report as long as the proceedings against Nauta and De Oliveira remain active, the DOJ said.

That means Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md) can see the report if the DOJ’s plan is allowed to proceed. Does anyone in their right mind think Raskin won’t immediately leak juicy details—or even misrepresent the findings—to his lackeys in the media?

The 11th circuit in Florida is now handling the matter on an expedited basis; more responses are due Wednesday night. In the meantime, Judge Cannon issued an order preventing the DOJ from sharing the draft outside of the department.

Hey AG Garland, What Happened to your Love for a Peaceful Transfer of Power?

President Trump also is fighting to block release of the report. In a letter to Garland, Trump’s attorneys demanded that the special counsel’s office “terminate all effort toward the preparation and release of this report.”

“[It] is clear, as has been the case with so many of the other actions of Smith and his staff, that the [report] merely continues Smith’s politically-motivated attack, and that his continued preparation of the Report and efforts to release it would be both imprudent and unlawful,” John Lauro and Todd Blanche, who represented Trump in the J6 case and documents case respectively, wrote to Garland on January 6.

The attorneys describe a rushed timeline that coincided with the December holidays along with accusations Smith’s team made secrecy demands, such as leaving behind electronic devices, before anyone could review the draft, which they did the first week of January.

Any report in advance of Trump’s inauguration, the attorneys argued, would violate the Presidential Transition Act, SCOTUS’s immunity opinion, and a separate SCOTUS opinion in Fischer v US, which reversed how the DOJ applied a post-Enron statute in J6 cases. (The statute, obstruction of an official proceeding, represents two of the four counts in Trump’s J6 case.)

Trump is not the only target of Smith’s report. It appears some of Trump’s nominees are subjected to “baseless attacks” in what the attorneys describe as an “obvious effort to interfere with upcoming confirmation hearings.” For example, Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, was chief of staff to the acting Defense Secretary on January 6, 2021; Patel will require Senate confirmation. Peter Navarro, who will not require Senate confirmation for his appointment as trade advisor, was sentenced to four months in prison on contempt of Congress convictions for refusing to cooperate with the J6 Select Committee.

“Smith’s proposed plan for releasing a report is unlawful, undertaken in bad faith, and contrary to the public interest,” Lauro and Blanche concluded.

If the DOJ releases Smith’s report before the inauguration, the move unquestionably represents an expedited timeline intended to dirty up the political waters before Trump is sworn in. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, for example, submitted a draft report on his investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election to then Attorney General William Barr on March 22, 2019; Barr released a redacted report on April 18, 2019.

Further, there is no need for a report considering the lengthy court record in each case. The docket in the documents case has nearly 700 briefs and orders totaling thousands of pages. A few weeks before the election, Chutkan allowed Smith to file an “unusual” brief about the J6 case that consisted of more than 2,000 pages. And the January 6 Select Committee, whose investigation focused entirely on Trump, released an 845-page report in December 2022.

What more could possibly be said?

“Jack Smith’s investigation has been politically motivated from the start,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Jordan (R-OH) told me through a spokesman. “From the unprecedented raid on Mar-a-Lago, to his appointment, to misconduct by his prosecutors, to mishandling the documents that were the basis for his investigation. The Washington Post even conceded that Democrats wanted the investigation so President Trump would face a ‘politically damaging trial before the election.’ Of course Jack Smith’s decision on when to release his report is based on politics.”

More Losing Ahead for Jack Smith

Smith announced his resignation shortly after the election. (No duh.) His chief prosecutor in the documents case, longtime DOJ political hatchetman Jay Bratt, retired this week, too. But both men, in addition to other prosecutors and investigators in the special counsel’s office, very likely will be targets of Congressional and/or Trump DOJ investigations. Senators Charles Grassley and Ron Johnson sent a letter to the DOJ requesting that all records relating to Smith’s investigations remain intact.

Rather than go away quietly, the biggest loser in DOJ history is going scorched earth until the bitter end on his diabolical crusade to damage Donald Trump. Smith’s losing streak, however, won’t end anytime soon.