By Mike Huckabee
August 3, 2023
|
|
Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, speaking with FOX NEWS’ Laura Ingraham, said that Trump’s latest indictment sets a dangerous precedent by criminalizing the behavior of four co-conspirators who were merely “giving good-faith legal advice to Trump.”
“...It’s more than a stretch to call something criminal if someone is seeking legal counsel from their own lawyers,” he said.
“The truth of the matter is they’re not going to stop going until they get him going or get him coming, and I say this as someone who is running against Trump,” he said. (Dan Bongino said on Tuesday that we’ve reached the emergency point, the “break glass” moment.) “...It would be easier for me,” VR said, “if Donald Trump were eliminated from the competition. That is not how any of us would want to win because that is bad for the country. That’s why I think it’s important for us competing against Trump to take a strong stand against these politicized statements.”
Which brings us to Mike Pence.
Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, said Wednesday that “any Republican politician who thinks what Merrick Garland and Jack Smith are doing here is justified” has disqualified himself. And Pence, in failing to condemn their tactics --- a shameful abuse of the Constitution by the DOJ that’s making our country unrecognizable --- he is disqualifying himself for the office of President or any other office. I like and respect Mike Pence, but responses like that are a signal that he’s not going to safeguard our rights from an out-of-control federal bureaucracy.
It also seems like a huge conflict of interest for Pence to be a witness against Trump when he’s Trump’s political adversary, actually running for the same nomination. Can it get any crazier? With Smith in charge, yes, it can.
Former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is believed to be “Co-conspirator #1” in Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump. If such a stalwart Trump supporter can be reduced to collateral damage in the fight against “Trump ‘24,” the left is fine with that. They hate him, too.
Attorney John Eastman is believed to be “Co-conspirator #2” and is now facing prosecution and possible disbarment. According to the indictment, this so-called co-conspirator called Ronna McDaniel, head of the Republican National Committee, and allegedly told her (“falsely,” Smith says) that a “fake electors” plan would be used only if ongoing litigation in the states was successful.
As Ingraham pointed out in the lead-in to her interview of Eastman, “It’s not a criminal act to have a novel legal theory about something, even if it’s about something like electors and the Constitution. Advice given from an attorney used to be sacrosanct. And it usually falls under the attorney-client privilege. But this is just another norm that the left will sacrifice on the altar of ‘getting Trump.’”
Eastman’s attorney Harvey Silverglate says his client will never flip or accept a plea deal because he is innocent, though the feds are applying pressure for him to do that. “We’re ruling it out now and forever,” Silverglate told the U.K. DAILY MAIL “because he committed no crime. If indicted, we’re going to trial. If convicted, we’re appealing.”
“There has been no crime committed by John Eastman,” Silverglate said. “I’m not speaking to any of the other targets, nor for Trump. But for Eastman, there will be no deal whatsoever, period.” Obviously, Eastman has completely ruled it out.
But watch the DOJ keep tightening the screws. You see, that’s how this ‘Justice’ Department works: when you want to get the big fish, catch some smaller fish in your net and try to get them to “flip.” Just ask Paul Manafort, who spent months in solitary without so much as a magazine.
Silverglate ripped as “thoroughly unprofessional” Smith’s leak of information on co-conspirators when they haven’t even been charged (yet), at least not publicly. He believes the prosecutor is hoping that one of them will come in and offer to make a deal, “plea to some lesser offense and help the government investigation, whether truthful or not.” He said that after 50 years of experience as a criminal defense lawyer, he knows “people will make up stories in order to be cooperators in order to get out of trouble.”
Of Eastman’s legal opinions, his attorney said, “Eastman gave cutting-edge advice. Now, that is lawful. Some of Eastman’s theories are derided by other lawyers, but they’re all “perfectly within the realm of good-faith legal advice.” He’s sure there are experts who can testify to this. “Remember, one of the things that lawyers try to do is figure out lawful ways for the client to do what the client wants to do.” Eastman’s advice was “within the realm of good faith,” he said, and they’re confident they can show it was “legal, lawful and ethical.”
It used to be that such confabs were covered by attorney-client privilege, but when it’s Trump, prosecutors ignore that. Ingraham rightly pointed out the irony that “obviously, their interpretation of these statutes, of the application of the statues THEMSELVES, are novel theories...So they’re guilty of the standard that they’re applying to Trump and Eastman, I guess, and the others.”
Silverglate pointed out what’s behind Eastman’s disbarment case in California. “The bar association, instead of waiting for the outcome of the court process, is looking to disbar him and take away his ability to fund his own defense in the criminal case.”
“This whole thing has become so politicized,” Silverglate said, “it’s not even funny. And it’s a blot on the Department of Justice, in my view...This is the most politicized indictment that I can remember in my 50-plus years of being a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer.”
He thinks the [appellate] courts “are not gonna fall for it...When somebody who is dispassionate writes a history of this, a lot of reputations are gonna go down the sewer.”
https://www.foxnews.com/video/
We’ll have more on the other co-conspirators soon. As the DAILY MAIL reports, Co-conspirator #3 is apparently attorney Sydney Powell. She’s made herself scarce since Dominion Voting Systems sued her for spouting “conspiracy theories” relating to the hack-ability of the Dominion electronic system. If there had been a real investigation of this, we’d surely know by now if there was anything to such claims. But we know now that regardless of the degree of vulnerability of electronic systems, the incredible lack of transparency about it is so concerning that the only way to deal with it is to return to old-fashioned in-person paper balloting, not connected electronically to anything. Zero hack-ability. Picture I.D. required. Voter rolls purged of dead people and those who have moved away. Poll watchers everywhere they want to go. So sue me.
The DAILY MAIL believes Co-conspirator #4 is former Justice Department official Jeff Clark, whose home the FBI raided in 2022. Clark was wearing boxer shorts and asked them if he could put on pants. The story doesn’t say if they let him.
The indictment says Trump met with Clark on December 22, 2021, to explore the possibility of installing him as acting Attorney General. Trump is said in the indictment to have brought this up to then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue. (My immediate thought was, so what? These are just discussions of what might legally be done, and nothing like this actually WAS done.)
Co-conspirator #5 is Kenneth Chesebro, accused of devising what was going to be the so-called “fake electors” scheme. Oddly, the Harvard-educated Chesebro studied with anti-Trump law professor Laurence Tribe and worked as a researcher for Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. But Nancy Pelosi’s Kangaroo Kommittee accused Chesebro of being “the architect of the fake elector plot” in seven states.
As we’ve said, there is nothing criminal about a state submitting an alternate slate of electors in case the vote count turns out to be different. It’s been done before, notably in Hawaii. In this case, though, it’s been twisted by prosecutors into a plan to subvert the popular will. Obviously, Trump didn’t trust the results of the 2020 election, and he had plenty of company at the time --- perhaps a lot more now.
Co-conspirator #6 is an unidentified consultant. Some are reporting (tentatively) that this might be Trump campaign senior advisor Boris Epshteyn, who, according to the WASHINGTON EXAMINER, “worked in coordination with Giuliani, Eastman and others on plots to establish alternate electors in various states.”
(Note to Jack Smith: this plan was only discussed, not carried out. Say, hypothetically, that this really was a scheme to substitute “fake electors” and put one over on America, but they changed their minds. If you discovered a group had plans to rob a bank, but then shelved the idea and didn’t rob it, would you still charge the leader of the group with bank robbery? I guess you would.)
https://www.
Leave a Comment
Note: Fields marked with an * are required.