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New disclosures reveal that Special Counsel Jack Smith, tasked with taking down Trump at any cost, received $140,000 in pro bono legal services from Covington & Burling.
Covington & Burling, the prominent D.C. law firm, was Biden’s campaign counsel.
While six figures in free legal aid might seem like a lot of money, C & B’s lawyers had contributed $657,924 to the Kamala campaign and $262,171 to the DNC. But that was a drop in the bucket compared to the $737,000 that it was paid for its services by the Biden campaign and the $4.5 million that the law firm had been paid by the DNC.
The $140,000 was easily ‘paid for’ by the lucrative economic relationship that Covington & Burling enjoyed with the Biden campaign and the Democratic party during the 2024 election.
The six figure support for Smith can be viewed as part of C & B’s work for the campaign.
And Jack Smith’s campaign to take down Trump, like the Steele dossier and the Mueller investigation, should be seen as the work of a political campaign using political operatives with experience in the Justice Department to corruptly prosecute a political opponent.
What’s even more revealing is that Smith’s attorneys are Lanny Breuer and Peter Koski.
Peter Koski, a former Obama Justice Department official, serving as Smith’s lawyer also served as the attorney for Biden’s counsel Dana Remus and Biden’s 2020 deputy counsel Pat Moore during the congressional impeachment inquiry into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents Remus is also a partner at C & B so that he was actually protecting both Biden and the firm.
Koski is the lawyer you call to represent your lawyers when you’re under investigation. And that’s appropriate since Jack Smith was arguably one of Biden’s lawyers all along playing the role of prosecutor in order to take down Biden’s leading political rivals before the election.
Smith’s meeting with Koski would have been a reunion with his old colleague, having served as the chief of the Public Integrity Section in the DOJ’s Criminal Division while Koski had been his Deputy Chief. Smith’s other lawyer was his former boss, the head of the Criminal Division.
Lanny Breuer, Smith’s other lawyer, is a much better known name for his role in Clinton’s impeachment and the Fast and Furious scandal. As Bill Clinton’s counsel, Breuer had defended him during the various investigations, including his impeachment, and then stepped in to aid former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger when he was caught smuggling documents out of the National Archives in his socks and pants to cover-up Clinton’s actions before 9/11.
With that kind of resume, it was no surprise that Obama appointed Breuer as the Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Criminal Division where he worked under former Attorney General Eric Holder who now occupies the position of senior counsel at Covington & Burling.
Holder, who like Smith and Koski, had come out of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, then brought in Covington & Burlin to vet Kamala’s vice presidential picks.
Covington & Burling is such a revolving door for Clinton, Obama and Biden DOJers that its offices are close to the Justice Department to make the move even easier.
When Breuer’s successor, Mythili Raman, left to join C&B, she told the New York Times that “reuniting with my former Justice Department colleagues was one of the biggest draws of Covington.” Much of her old Obama DOJ team was already there. Or soon would be.
There’s been a longtime revolving door from C&B to the DOJ. And back.
Rather than viewing the Justice Department and the powerful D.C. law firm as two separate entities, it may be more useful to see them as two resting places for the same network. That network encompassed the legal talent, in the DOJ’s political investigations arm, counsels in the White House and its defense operation of DOJ vets working at Covington & Burling.
The network had the same fundamental agendas. Its employment was purely strategic.
At the DOJ, members of the network targeted and prosecuted political opponents, at the White House, they defended their team and in private practice, they protected them.
When the law firm that acted as counsel to the Biden campaign, helped pick Kamala’s VP and is staffed by former Attorney General Eric Holder and a roster of DOJ ‘PINers’ who worked with Holder and Smith, stepped forward to offer six figures of pro bono legal work for Smith, they made it all too obvious that the prosecution campaign against Trump melded the two worlds.
Prosecuting Trump was never about the law. We know this because of multiple media leaks of Biden grousing at Attorney General Merrick Garland, for not working harder to lock Trump up. There was never anything independent about Jack Smith’s status as a special counsel. And now that the people behind the investigation are out of office when, despite their best efforts, Trump won, their partners in private practice are stepping in to offer Smith legal protection.
The only difference is that Smith is no longer being funded by taxpayers but indirectly by the former Biden campaign and the DNC which paid millions to the law firm defending him for ‘free’.
The revolving door between the Justice Department and private law firms reveal an ethical divide far vaster than the federalist palatial architecture of the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building and the slick glass and steel modernism of CityCenter’s glass and steel towers where Covington & Burling occupies the office space above the luxury goods stores like
Louis Vuitton downstairs. It’s a chasm that makes Americans question the integrity of the Department of Justice and its political prosecutions.
And the Biden campaign’s favorite lawyers, bringing together the former heads of the Criminal Division and Public Integrity Section to defend one of their own who had been tasked with taking down Trump from within the government is only going to widen that chasm into an abyss of guilt.