Jack Smith’s crusade ends with a whimper

What a waste. As Special Counsel Jack Smith had his 2020 election charges against President-elect Trump dismissed by Justice Tanya Chutkan, any amusement derived from the fact Smith and his merry band of anti-Trumpers just spent two years spinning their wheels is belied by the damage caused by his travesty.

It is not only the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars squandered. It is not only thousands of misused hours of investigators and prosecutors who should have been pursuing violent crimes, drug and human trafficking and terrorism cases. It is not only countless time spent clogging the dockets of courts in Florida and Washington, DC, which should have been used for legitimate cases.

The travesty here is the fact that, after 200 years of respecting the legal process, our nation has now crossed the precipice of using the legal system to persecute political enemies. The temptation will now always exist to do it again.

Americans did not need to be white-shoe Washington attorneys to sense things were awry. The deference they were told to give to these elite prosecutors and law enforcement officials — supplemented by non-stop legal talking heads on the usual networks — could not overcome the sense that the system was being seriously abused.

Maybe one methodical investigation and indictment could have been argued with a straight face. But not two, in two jurisdictions, which candidate Donald Trump was expected to defend simultaneously. And not coupled with a transparently flimsy pile-on of state criminal and civil cases in New York and Fulton County. And not alongside a nonsensical effort in Colorado to have Trump kicked off the ballot on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, which was rightfully rejected by a unanimous Supreme Court.

And the icing on the cake? A president and attorney general hiding behind Smith’s special counsel designation to avoid looking the public in the eye and explaining why these cases were so critical to pursue.

If President Biden had any integrity he would have explained to the American people why these cases were so serious they needed to be brought against his political opponent in the heat of a re-election campaign, and why Justice Department policy needed to be disregarded so they could be rushed to trial by Election Day. The hysteria was fueled for years such that by election season claims that Trump was the embodiment of Adolf Hitler-style fascism had become commonplace. It was predicted that if reelected Trump would imprison his political foes, destroy the media, round up minorities into concentration camps and shred what remained of the Constitution.

His illegal takedown of a Virginia governor overturned by the Supreme Court, and his anti-Trump lawfare campaign now rejected by the American public, Smith will be relegated to the dustbin of history. The firestorm he wrought must never happen again.