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In his latest meltdown on Truth Social, former President Donald Trump criticized new special counsel Jack Smith as a “hit man” and a “fully weaponized monster,” claiming without evidence that he is under tremendous pressure from his family to prosecute him.
Trump shared a post by one of his right-wing allies claiming that Smith’s sister-in-law, who is reportedly a psychologist, compared experiencing the same feelings of dread she felt after the 9/11 attacks to what she felt after Trump won the White House. The post alleges that she told her “crying, sobbing” patients to “resist” and “fight” Trump’s administration.
“—And I’m supposed to get a fair shake from this person, who’s under tremendous pressure from his family, but he is actually worse than they are?” Trump wrote. “Can Republicans, and fair-minded people, generally, allow this to happen? Jack Smith is nothing less than a hit man for Obama, his Attorney General Eric Holder, and Andrew Weissmann. Weaponization. Our Country is in big trouble, a real mess!”
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Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith, a war crimes prosecutor, to oversee Justice Department investigations related to Trump’s handling of sensitive documents found at his Mar-a-Lago residence and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump has called the move by the Justice Department a “horrendous abuse of power” and described the process as a “RIGGED SCAM”. In a previous post, he referred to Smith as a “Radical Left Prosecutor,” who is controlled by former Attorney General Eric Holder and former President Barack Obama.
In other posts, he has questioned why the Justice Department has not raided other presidents’ homes.
“….When will you invade Bill and Hillary’s home in search of the 33,000 emails she deleted AFTER receiving a subpoena from the U.S. Congress?” Trump wrote. “When will you invade the other Presidents’ homes in search of documents, which are voluminous, which they took with them, but not nearly so openly and transparently as I did?”
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Trump claimed that he “did nothing wrong on January 6th” and nothing wrong by taking classified documents to his Florida home.
Unlike 2017, Trump won’t be protected by the same political and legal conditions that allowed him to come out of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation unscathed, Axios reported.
The Justice Department policy that barred Mueller from indicting a sitting president does not apply to Trump anymore since he is no longer in office and his tactic of threatening to fire DOJ officials is also no longer available to him, according to Axios.
“I was described by Steve Bannon … as a pit bull,” former top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman tweeted. “Jack Smith makes me look like a golden retriever puppy.”
Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner also weighed in on the matter, posting an analysis to his YouTube channel, saying that Trump’s attacks on Smith’s wife are a “sign of desperation.”
Trump has gone after documentary filmmaker Katy Chevigny, who worked as a producer on Michelle Obama’s “Becoming,” and also donated $2,000 to President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, according to FEC filings.
He posted screenshots to Truth Social, claiming that the Justice Department is being weaponized against him and called Smith a “hard-line Radical Left Special Counsel.”
“Think about it,” Kirschner said. “If the target of an investigation could create a conflict by attacking the prosecutor’s spouse, and then maybe somehow convincing people that the prosecutor’s gotta go, well, wouldn’t that just encourage guys like Donald Trump to go after the prosecutor’s spouse? Or family member? None of this will work.”
Kirschner added: “So if you take Trump’s argument to its logical conclusion, if a prosecutor’s spouse is political in any way … the prosecutor cannot prosecute anybody who’s a Republican or a Democrat.”
Several of Trump’s allies have joined him in criticizing Smith’s wife’s views as a conflict of interest, but failed to apply the same level of scrutiny when it was revealed that Ginni Thomas, the wife of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was involved in efforts to reverse President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
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Areeba Shah is a staff writer at Salon covering news and politics. Previously, she was a research associate at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and a reporting fellow for the Pulitzer Center, where she covered how COVID-19 impacted migrant farmworkers in the Midwest.
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