There’s no denying at this point that things are developing very quickly in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into scandal-ridden former President Donald Trump, following his appointment to the position by Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland, to spearhead the Justice Department’s numerous investigations into the corrupt ex-commander in chief.
In fact, following an extremely aggressive subpoena issued against Trump by Smith following the discovery of even more classified materials at the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago estate, this time stowed away in Trump’s private residential quarters of the Palm Beach golf club, legal experts have reached a general consensus that Smith’s aggression in these investigations indicates that he will leave “no stone unturned.”
But according to the experts, there are even deeper signals from Jack Smith than what meets the eye.
Recently, we reported on the bombshell news that Special Counsel Smith had officially issued a subpoena against Donald Trump’s former vice president and right-hand man, Mike Pence, compelling the ex-VP to appear and testify under oath before a special grand jury. It’s expected that this subpoena will ultimately serve as the catalyst that officially turns Pence against Trump, as the former VP enjoys no privileges that could possibly protect him from very real, very serious charges of contempt should he refuse to comply.
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Now, the experts are saying that Smith’s recent moves are a clear signal that the special counsel is not only moving far faster and with far more force than initially expected, but that he is closing in on the corrupt former president with genuine force — meaning official “criminal charges” against Donald Trump “are close.”
As the news of the Pence subpoena broke, Former FBI agent Peter Strzok warned that going after Trump’s vice president was the “last step” before going after the big guy himself. Michigan Law School professor and former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade echoed that sentiment in an interview with Newsweek.
“It signals that DOJ is seriously considering criminal charges against Trump for January 6,” McQuade said.“While it does not mean charges are a certainty, DOJ would not take such a significant step as subpoenaing a former VP if they thought the case was unlikely to result in charges. It also suggests that charges are close. Prosecutors typically question the top witnesses at the end of the investigation after they have learned as much as they can about the facts.”
The former president has been desperate to wield his “executive privilege” to protect himself from the wide-reaching cases against him, that are threatening to bury him alive. But the fact of the matter is, Donald J. Trump enjoys no such privileges. Not anymore, anyway. Any claims to “executive privilege” Trump once had went by the wayside the moment President Joe Biden took office, following his defeat of Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The only person who bears such a privilege is the president himself.
Not only is Biden the only one who possesses executive privilege, he is the only one who can choose to bestow it as well — and the president has already made it crystal clear that he fully absolves any such privileges in connection to the barbaric, violent January 6th attack on the nation’s Capitol and Congress, and any and all investigations into Donald Trump and his allies’ attempts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.
This, of course, hasn’t stopped Trump from attempting to invoke privileges he doesn’t have anyway. However, the former president has repeatedly been slammed off his pedestal at every turn — including by the US Supreme Court that he purposely and intentionally stacked to look more like a branch of the Republican Party than a branch of the US federal government. But even SCOTUS wouldn’t save him, refusing to uphold the ex-president’s unhinged demands to invoke executive privilege for not only himself, but also to stop any of his former White House staffers or political appointees from testifying before the now-dissolved January 6th House Select Committee in their investigation into the deadly Capitol attack.
McQuade further explained, “Biden will decline, I am sure, and if it goes to court, I think Trump will lose based on the court’s earlier decision that Trump could not use executive privilege to block the National Archives from producing documents to the Jan 6 Committee.”
Should Trump ultimately decide to fight his way back to the Supreme Court yet again in the matter, not only will he almost undoubtedly lose, precedent hailing all the way back to the infamous Nixon Watergate scandal would back up his demise.
Read McQuade’s full analysis with Newsweek here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
