George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, an expert on the Constitution who has testified before Congress and even represented members in court, is among those professionals who doubt the value of Jack Smith’s indictment of President Trump for conspiracy and obstruction over his First Amendment-protected comments about the 2020 election.
But he said the case, brought by Smith in what many observers bluntly charge is a politicized move by the Joe Biden-supervised DOJ against his primary opponent in the 2024 presidential election, is accomplishing one thing.
It’s making people trust the DOJ less.
Which would be an accomplishment given its work with Democrats and Russians in 2016 to fabricate the “Russia collusion” claims against President Trump, and its years-long campaign that there actually was something that Trump did wrong.
Then the DOJ’s branch, the FBI, interfered in the 2020 election by warning legacy and social media publications against allowing information to be available to the public about the Biden family scandals documented on the laptop computer Hunter Biden abandoned.
That reporting, of course, has all been confirmed as accurate, and those Biden clan scandals now are grabbing attention at the highest levels for congressional investigators, with reports of $5 million bribes paid to Hunter and Joe Biden.
Online, he wrote, “Polls previously showed that roughly half of the public viewed earlier charges against Trump as politically motivated. That is why many of us hoped that any indictment would be based on unquestioned legal authority and unassailable evidence.”
He continued, “Smith offered neither. This indictment will deepen the view of many in the public that the Justice Department is thoroughly compromised in pursuing political prosecutions.
“These concerns were magnified Tuesday by Smith, who announced the charges with comments that made him sound more like a pundit than a prosecutor. The special counsel gave an impassioned account of the Capitol riot that made it sound like Trump was charged with incitement. He wasn’t. Nor was he charged with seditious conspiracy, despite his second impeachment on those charges,” he said.
He pointed out, “Notably, many of the legal experts praising the indictment previously insisted that there was a clear case for incitement against Trump. Indeed, Democratic members made the claim the center of the second impeachment, despite some of us writing that there was no actionable claim. Even Smith wouldn’t touch the incitement or sedition claims that were endlessly pushed by legal experts and Democratic members.”
He said the bottom line is that “Smith and his team have made history in the worst way by attempting to fully criminalize disinformation by seeking the incarceration of a politician on false claims made during and after an election.”
He explained, “The hatred for Trump is so all-encompassing that legal experts on the political left have ignored the chilling implications of this indictment. This complaint is based largely on statements that are protected under the First Amendment. It would eviscerate free speech and could allow the government to arrest those who are accused of spreading disinformation in elections.”
He pointed out the Supreme Court already has ruled on such a dispute, stating in 2012 in U.S. v. Alvarez that “it is unconstitutional to criminalize lies in a case involving a politician who lied about military decorations.”
Turley said, “The court warned such criminalization ‘would give government a broad censorial power unprecedented in this Court’s cases or in our constitutional tradition. The mere potential for the exercise of that power casts a chill, a chill the First Amendment cannot permit if free speech, thought, and discourse are to remain a foundation of our freedom.’”
He said Smith goes astray by claiming that candidates are allowed to make false statements, but Trump had to be charged because he made “knowingly false statements.”
Turley noted that to obtain a conviction, Smith “Will have to bulldoze through the First Amendment and a line of Supreme Court cases. That’s why this latest indictment of Trump isn’t just wrong. It is reckless.”
This article was originally published by the WND News Center.
This post originally appeared on WND News Center.