GREGG JARRETT: Should prosecutors be prosecuted for their lawfare campaign against Trump?

One by one, the cooked up criminal cases against Donald Trump imploded. With them, the fever dreams of Democrats and their media handmaidens collapsed.

Now, their nightmare begins. A reckoning looms.  

There was a time not long ago that Trump’s adversaries openly celebrated what they described as his imminent demise. They assured us that the terrible Orange-Man was destined for a jumpsuit of the same color behind bars. Four criminal indictments would almost certainly end any attempt to return to the White House.

That was their scheme, at least.  

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But a funny thing happened on the way to the November 5 presidential election.  It turns out, the cases were as brittle as glass. They shattered under the weight of legal scrutiny and public opinion.  

The prosecutions self-destructed as evidence of lawless abuse emerged. They were sham charges built on rigged investigations, unfair grand juries, deceptive warrants, a splashy FBI raid, novel theories that were mostly ludicrous, and a biased New York judge and jury.

The Four Trump Cases

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment was the only one that made it to trial. Pushing a convoluted and incoherent argument, expired bookkeeping misdemeanors miraculously mutated into mythical felonies that were only vaguely identified.  

Like a game of Charades, we were left to guess what underlying crimes Trump was actually convicted of. The jurors never said. Their verdicts may or may not have been unanimous.

That constitutional dereliction aside, Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom devolved into a three-ring circus of prejudicial rulings and reversible errors that made a mockery of justice. Bragg spent millions of dollars to engineer a pre-ordained outcome that, under New York law, never carried any real punishment. 

The case that began with a bang ended in a whimper last Friday when Trump was granted an unconditional discharge. No harm, no foul.  

In Georgia, Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis humiliated herself by her own salacious misconduct.  She and her paramour, chief prosecutor Nathan Wade, were sent packing, leaving their Trump case on life support and headed to the graveyard of misbegotten prosecutions. It was never a racketeering case. It was a politically ginned up farce.

Special Counsel Jack Smith managed a historic "twofer." He was forced to drop all charges against Trump in Florida over supposedly mishandled classified documents when a federal judge correctly ruled that Smith was unlawfully appointed. Never mind that he wrongfully criminalized what should have been a civil dispute over records.   

His other prosecution in Washington DC claiming election interference was gutted by two Supreme Court rulings on obstruction and immunity. Trump’s victory in November put the final nail in the coffin of Smith’s J-6 case which was promptly dismissed. On Saturday, he ignominiously resigned.  

The lawfare campaign waged for more than two years against President-elect Donald Trump is one of the most abominable collection of legal abuses in modern history. It was launched by Democrats for purely partisan reasons, based on the arrogant assumption that indictments against him would destroy his electoral chances and ensure his opponent’s triumph.

Trump proved them wrong. As he fought back, Americans came to recognize the prosecutions for exactly what they were — unscrupulous attempts to corrupt the choosing of a president. Citizens rebelled. Their discovery of the truth fanned the flame of resentment and drove even more people to his defense.  

Votes cast at the ballot box became the ultimate jury verdict.

Prosecuting The Prosecutors

When those who are entrusted to enforce the law, instead, weaponize their power to persecute an innocent person under the guise of justice, it is the worst kind of oppression.  

The question now arises, should lawfare prosecutors be held accountable and, if merited, prosecuted?   

It is imperative that a comprehensive investigation be launched by the incoming Department of Justice to provide answers. Doing nothing is not an option.  Unchecked power, if ignored, undermines our democracy and breeds contempt for the law. Abuse is contagious, and its corresponding injustice will metastasize.  It is the greatest menace to freedom.

A case can be made that Smith, Bragg, and Willis deliberately distorted laws beyond their plain meaning and written reason. Their Twilight Zone prosecutions were a jumbled miasma of nonsense. Nothing was what it seemed. But did they deliberately violate Trump’s rights and/or the rights of voters? Let’s review.

The sordid lawfare crusade began the moment Trump announced his candidacy for president in November of 2022. A scant three days later, President Joe Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith who opened a dilating investigation of Trump. 

There is little doubt that lawfare prosecutors took their marching orders from Biden whose White House confederates had leaked to "The New York Times" that "he believed former president Donald J. Trump was a threat to democracy and should be prosecuted."  

Biden didn’t need to order the indictments. The message was sent and received, loud and clear.

Acting Associate Attorney General, Matthew Colangelo, suddenly resigned his lofty position as Biden’s third-highest-ranking official at the DOJ to lead the local New York prosecution of his boss’s chief political rival. Charges against Trump followed. 

Thereafter, with consent from Garland, Smith brought his own indictments in Florida and Washington DC. Not to be left out, Willis jumped in with criminal charges in Georgia. 

Prosecutors in four different cases delivered precisely what Biden wanted.

Predictably, a wounded Trump was mauled by the mainstream media that wasted no time in crafting his political obituary. He would never return to the Oval Office, they insisted. He would surely go to prison. They never envisioned that Trump would prevail by exposing the frailties of their cases and the blatant weaponization of the law for political gain.  

All these cases had one common denominator — direct connections to Biden and Garland. There is credible evidence that they worked in concert with the prosecutors and coordinated their shameful legal assault on Trump.  

The Bragg-Colangelo link to Biden and his DOJ is self-evident. But there’s more.

In the Willis case, her boyfriend Wade met rather secretly with Biden’s White House not once but twice, according to his billing records. He finally admitted it under questioning, but claimed total amnesia about what was discussed. Right.

There is evidence that a top aide to Smith also met with Biden’s White House counsel’s office just weeks before Trump was charged in the classified documents case. Why would such a meeting have taken place during an active investigation into the president’s Republican opponent?  

There may be plausible explanations for all of this, although I tend to doubt it.  But the appearance of impropriety now merits a broad and exhaustive investigation. I suspect more incriminating information will be uncovered.  

Two months ago, Congress sent Smith a formal demand that he and his staff preserve all records involving their work. Let’s hope they complied. The newly installed DOJ should examine the documents and interview Smith, Bragg, and Willis, as well as their respective staffs.  

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There are two civil rights statutes that are relevant to acts of corruption by prosecutors. 18 USC 241 criminalizes a conspiracy to "injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person" in their free exercise of Constitutional rights or privileges.  18 USC 242 makes it a felony for government officials to act "under color of any law" to willfully deprive someone of their statutory or Constitutional rights.

If lawfare prosecutors knew there was no legitimate basis for their indictments, but manipulated the law for the purpose of damaging Trump’s presidential campaign, such evidence could constitute civil rights violations and would be actionable against them under these criminal statutes.  

However, that is a high bar. If it is not met, prosecuting the prosecutors would be wrong. In the interests of justice and for the good of the country, we can no longer tolerate legal reprisals or retribution.  

Unless there is overwhelming evidence of criminality, the age of lawfare must cease. There should be no vindictive prosecutions here. Americans are fed up with special counsels and bogus criminal charges.  

It is time, once and for all, to end the politically-driven witch hunts. 

Gregg Jarrett is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. His recent book, "The Trial of the Century," about the famous "Scopes Monkey Trial" is available in bookstores nationwide or can be ordered online at the Simon & Schuster website.  Jarrett’s latest book, "The Constitution of the United States and Other Patriotic Documents," was published by Broadside Books, a division of HarperCollins on November 14, 2023.  Gregg is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book "The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump." His follow-up book was also a New York Times bestseller, "Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History."