Meanwhile, the real news about Trump has nothing to do with the outcome of Tuesday’s election in Georgia. It also has nothing to do with the verdict in the New York State case against the Trump Organization. And it certainly has absolutely nothing to do with the report which is going to be issued by the Select Committee about January 6h.
In fact, that report will be, if anything, another example of what Aesop or maybe some guy in Persia once said about how the mountain roared and out came a mouse.
But leaving all those other events aside, the really big deal is what happened last week when local officials in four states – Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania – received subpoenas from a Grand Jury being led by a Federal Prosecutor named Jack Smith.
Remember Jack Smith? He’s the Special Counsel appointed by Merrick Garland to investigate specific connections between Donald Trump and January 6th. And by the way, these subpoenas aren’t served in some polite way like the subpoenas issued by the Select Committee which in some cases were simply ignored.
What happens with a subpoena from a Federal Grand Jury is that there’s a knock on your front door, you open the door and you’re staring at a bunch of nasty-looking guys wearing those nasty, blue uniforms with a badge in front and the letters ‘FBI’ in back. Like the uniforms worn by the team that found all those classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, okay?
They ask if they can enter your home, but it doesn’t matter how you respond because not only do they have a subpoena telling you to show up at the Grand Jury, but they also usually have a search warrant allowing them to go tramping through your home.
For all the talk about Constitutional protection, and Constitutional rights, and Constitutional this and Constitutional that, by the time the FBI team gets done trashing your place, you’ll understand fully what ‘due process’ really means. It means that when they slap the irons on your wrists and shove you into the back seat of the police car, that you’ll be allowed to make one phone call from jail.
The point is that the FBI agents who serve those love-notes from the Grand Jury and tear your house apart aren’t trained to be nice guys. They are trained to make you feel that they know you did something you weren’t supposed to do.
And I love, by the way, how the lawyer for the guy who’s now a ‘target’ for a criminal investigation always says how his client will ‘fully cooperate’ with the authorities who are building the case. What's he supposed to say? That his client won’t cooperate?
Of course, we actually have someone out there who has not only said he won’t cooperate but also insists that those clauses in the Constitution which allow the government to look into his private affairs should be thrown out. I notice how what he is saying kept the FBI from searching his home.
What makes this move by Jack Smith so interesting, however, was not just serving Grand Jury subpoenas on some local government officials in four states. Because the real juicy part of this story is that Smith is seeking any communications between these officials and a whole raft of attorneys who spent the last two years lying to various judges about the so-called election ‘fraud.’
In particular, this group includes that idiot Sidney Powell and Trump’s TV attorney (which is what Michael Cohen calls him) Rudy Giuliani, who evidently began meeting with local election people as early as just a week or so after the 2020 election took place.
Incidentally, don’t make the mistake of thinking that Giuliani only began shooting his mouth off about election ‘fraud’ at that bizarre press conference in front of the landscaping company (and across the street from the porno shop) in Philly four days after the 2020 vote. In fact, when Rudy first ran for New York City Mayor in 1989 and lost to David Dinkins by some 47,000 votes, he claimed the election was ‘stolen’ because some people voted ‘eight to ten times.’
When Rudy ran a second time and defeated Dinkins in 1993, he didn’t need to worry about election ‘fraud’ because he ran what had to be the single most racist municipal election campaign of all time. His campaign was even more racist than the two campaigns run by his ‘personal’ client, i.e., Donald Trump.
I don’t really care whether Trump is indicted or goes to jail. But I wouldn’t mind seeing Rudy getting on the bus to go to Butner for a couple of years. And maybe at some point Rudy can share his cell at Butner with Alan Dershowitz, but that’s a story for another time.