The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday denied Jack Smith’s motion to expedite the review of the question of whether or not former President Trump is immune from prosecution in the federal case involving interference with the 2020 presidential election. The federal 2020 election trial may go beyond its currently planned start date of March 4 as a result of the high court’s decision. Earlier this month, Smith requested that the Supreme Court decided swiftly whether Donald Trump who is the Republican presidential frontrunner is totally immune from prosecution for so called crimes committed during his presidency.
This assertion has been pivotal to the defense strategy of Trump’s legal team. Following U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s rejection of arguments claiming immunity from the indictment, it sought a stay on proceedings. The appeal is currently pending, so the case’s proceedings have come to a halt. Wednesday, attorneys for former Attorney General Ed Meese and two of the top constitutional scholars in the country filed a brief arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court must reject Smith’s petition against Trump because his appointment as special counsel is unconstitutional.
Their amicus brief contends that Smith’s representation of the United States in his petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court is invalid due to his lack of authority. This is because Congress has not established the position he holds, and his appointment is in violation of the Constitution’s “Appointments Clause.” The filing alleges that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland made an improper appointment of Smith to a non-existent office, for which Garland lacks the necessary authority, Breitbart noted. Meese, Steven Calabresi, the co-chairman of the Federalist Society, and Gary Lawson, a renowned constitutional law professor, contend that Congress alone has the authority to create federal positions like the one Smith is currently holding, and Congress has not used this power.
Although the Constitution establishes the positions of President and Vice President, Congress possesses exclusive authority to establish additional positions, as the Constitution stipulates that such positions must be “established by law.” The Congress had previously enacted legislation to grant authorization for a comparable role known as “independent counsel.” However, this statute lapsed in 1999. The lawyers claim that Garland is unable to assign a subordinate to perform tasks that Congress has not approved. Only an individual with the title of “officer” possesses the requisite level of authority.
While establishing the Department of Justice, Congress granted it specific powers through legislation. However, it did not authorize any office with the same level of authority as a U.S. Attorney, which Garland has bestowed upon Smith. The amicus brief further argues, “Even if one somehow thinks that existing statutes authorize the appointment of stand-alone special counsels with the full power of a U.S. Attorney, Smith was not properly appointed to such an ‘office.’” They contend that even if Congress authorized special counsels, anyone holding such authority would require presidential nomination and Senate confirmation.
Additionally, the brief contended that Smith’s authority is comparable to that of a U.S. attorney, as he is a “principal officer” according to the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. This means that confirmation by a majority of the U.S. Senate is mandatory following his nomination by the president. “Improperly appointed, he has no more authority to represent the United States in this Court than Bryce Harper, Taylor Swift, or Jeff Bezos,” they write. While the primary focus of these briefs is to argue against the Supreme Court granting Smith’s petition to transfer the case to the high court, their reasoning would require lower federal courts to dismiss Smith’s entire portfolio of prosecutions, including all pending charges against Trump.
During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Meese served as Attorney General. Congress’s approval of independent counsel played a significant role during this time. Alina Habba, an attorney representing former President Donald Trump’s Save America PAC, is slamming Special Counsel Jack Smith for moving quickly to have the U.S. Supreme Court consider the federal criminal case involving the 2020 election and Trump’s immunity defense. The indictment accuses Trump of participating in criminal conspiracies to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Trump has sought to dismiss the charges by claiming that he has presidential immunity.
Smith has raised the matter with the nation’s top court, stating that it should be addressed before the D.C. Circuit’s decision and referencing the upcoming March 4 trial date for Trump. With the Supreme Court’s approval, Trump is now required to reply by December 20. After that, they will determine whether or not to accept the case. “There is some sort of real sense of urgency,” Habba said in an interview. “The only urgency that I can see is that there is an election in November 2024, and they can’t beat him.”
Habba said “everyone can see” what Smith is doing and said it “is election interference at its finest.” “They can’t beat him in the ballots, so they’re going to have to either, you know, lie, cheat, steal, or the newest, law fare, put him in jail, and tie him up,” she told Fox Business Network’s Larry Kudlow. Kudlow suggested that since Trump would have to sit in trial every day for the case, they don’t want him on the campaign trail.
Habba agreed and said, “It’s playing against them.” “He’s getting a lot of voters that he normally wouldn’t get because they’re seeing this and he is the victim of, all of a sudden, they’ve made him a victim of complete and utter election interference and law fare,” she said. Habba said she has faith in the Supreme Court because they “really take their office seriously, and we’ve seen that time and time again with that, especially recently.”
So this so called gag order aimed at restraining Donald Trump for putting the judge overseeing his federal election interference case in her place! This also seems that the Judge is now in a tricky and sticky position. She must balance the need to protect the integrity of the legal proceedings against the First Amendment rights of a presidential candidate to defend himself in public. OOPS! But of course things like LAWS, Rules, and the constituional rights to "SPEAK" is something the left doesn't like. They like Open Borders, Lies, doing massive drugs, and well there is a weird thing happening where there seems to be a whole lot of love for pedophiles from these people.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan will hear arguments Monday in Washington over whether Trump has gone too far with remarks such as calling prosecutors a “team of thugs” and one possible witness “a gutless pig.” Watching the case, and the other cases these libtards are putting Trump in well I would say not just is he justified for his comments but to be honest I would have said A LOT more and much worse. He's keeping it clean if you ask me.
While some say this might be the biggest test yet for Chutkan, hidding her biased has become clear from day one! She's a complete puppet and wants him in prison so it's underscoring the unprecedented complexities of prosecuting the former Republican president as the judge vows not to let political considerations guide her decisions. Ending the stream of Trump’s harsh language would make the case easier to manage. But among the difficult questions Chutkan must navigate is how any gag order might be enforced and how one could be fashioned that does not risk provoking Trump’s base and fueling his claims of political persecution as he campaigns to retake the White House in 2024 in which he doesn't just lead the rest of the GOP but Biden himself in every poll!
“She has to think about the serious risk that it’s not just his words that could trigger violence, but that she could play into the conspiracy theories that Trump’s followers tend to believe in, and that her act of issuing a gag order might trigger a very disturbing response,” said Catherine Ross said, a George Washington University law school professor.
“If we allow that to stop a judge from doing what is called for, that’s a big problem for rule of law. But on the other hand, if I were the judge, I would certainly be thinking about it,” she said. Short of issuing an order, Chutkan has already suggested that inflammatory comments could force her to move up the trial, now scheduled to begin in March, to guard against tainting the jury pool. Judges can threaten gag order violators with fines or jail time, but jailing a presidential candidate could prompt serious political blowback and pose logistical hurdles. It's not like this is a legit case anyway so while his rights have been violated from her, and the other people trying to take him to his death bed.
This Shitkan of a woman, who was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama and is Jamaincan like VP Harris, isn’t the first judge to confront the consequences of Trump’s speech. The judge in his civil fraud trial in New York recently imposed a limited gag order prohibiting personal attacks against court personnel following a social media post that maligned the judge’s principal clerk.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team envisions a broader order, seeking to bar Trump from making inflammatory and intimidating comments about lawyers, witnesses and others involved in the case that accuses the former president of illegally plotting to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump’s lawyers call it a “desperate effort at censorship” that would prevent Trump from telling his side of the story while campaigning. While Biden sells our country down to our enemies and with Obamas orders is literally killing our economy on purpose, and has set up proxy wars, got people LITERALLY killed! Order a strike in the past which killed school children, and these people called it a successfull strike. Oh and the LAPTOP IS REAL!!!
A complicating factor is that many of the potential witnesses in the case are themselves public figures. In the case of Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence is also running against Trump for the GOP nomination. That could open the door for Trump’s team to argue that he should be permitted to respond to public broadsides he sees on television or seek a competitive edge by denouncing a political rival for the White House. Burt Neuborne, a longtime civil liberties lawyer who challenged gag orders on behalf of defendants and lawyers in other cases, questioned whether a formal order was necessary because witness intimidation is already a crime and the court can guard against a tainted jury by carefully questioning prospective jurors before trial.
A gag order may also slow down the case because it’s likely Trump either violates it and the judge will want to punish him or Trump will challenge the order in advance, he said. “And so in some sense, you may be playing directly into his hands by essentially creating yet another mechanism for him to try to push this until after the 2024 election because this is exactly what needs to be done since these leftists are violating his civil rights with all these bogus puppets for Obama... So any gag order that she issues will eventually reach the Supreme Court,” Neuborne said. But Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney in Michigan, said she believes the judge can issue a narrow enough order that withstands legal challenges and protects both the case and Trump’s abilities to campaign.
Especially in this case, where Donald Trump has made it apparent that he will say all kinds of facts since the Judge, and his cohorts are all sold out and want doom for the Donald and so they can say things about him but he can't say anything back and publically defend himself? Well more power to him! This so called judge, is about witnesses the power of words of truth when the public gets wind of how crooked this person is. McQuade, a University of Michigan Law School professor said “So in some ways she has, I think, a responsibility to act here.” Yeah she needs to remove herself from being the Judge and dismiss this case.
There is some limited precedent for restricting speech of political candidates who are criminal defendants. In one case, a federal appeals court in 1987 lifted a gag order on U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Sr., a Tennessee Democrat charged in a fraud case. Ford, who was ultimately acquitted, claimed the case brought under Republican President Ronald Reagan’s administration was racially and politically motivated.
Ford’s gag order prohibited him from even sharing his opinion of or discussing facts of the case. The court noted that Ford would soon be up for reelection and said the gag order would unfairly prevent him from responding to attacks from his political opponents and block his constituents from hearing the “views of their congressman on this issue of undoubted public importance.”
Another appeals court in 2000 upheld a gag order challenged by then-Louisiana Insurance Commissioner Jim Brown in a fraud case, noting the order allowed assertions of innocence and other general statements about the case. The court, however, also noted that the judge briefly lifted the gag order to avoid interfering with Brown’s reelection campaign, saying that the “urgency of a campaign, which may well require that a candidate, for the benefit of the electorate as well as himself, have absolute freedom to discuss his qualifications, has passed.”
Chutkan herself has experience with gag orders. In 2018, she imposed an order restricting the comments of lawyers in the case of Maria Butina, a Russian gun activist who pleaded guilty to working in America as a secret agent for Moscow. The order followed prosecutors’ admission that they had wrongly accused Butina of trading sex for access as well as public comments by her lawyer that Chutkan said had “crossed the line.”
The next year, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson imposed a gag order on Trump ally Roger Stone in his obstruction and witness tampering case after he posted a photo of judge with what appeared to be crosshairs of a gun. Though she warned she could jail him if he violated the order, she instead barred him from using social media months later after he again publicly disparaged the case against him.
