Even though Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith acknowledged that former President Donald Trump had the First Amendment right to question the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, he nevertheless pursued charges related to the then-president’s pursuit of remedies to the perceived fraud.
Jack Smith's indictment is nothing but a criminalization of political speech.
In the 3rd paragraph, he says President Trump "had a right like every American to speak publicly about the election and even to claim falsely that he had won."
But apparently he's indicting him for it… pic.twitter.com/M7eETbqh06
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 1, 2023
Smith’s case hinges on whether Trump actually believed he lost the election at the time he asserted that he was the actual winner and challenged President Joe Biden’s declared victory.
A number of prominent politicians and pundits have argued that there was plenty of evidence available at the time to give Trump the idea that fraud was a factor in the results.
During a recent segment of “The Five,” Fox News Channel’s Jesse Watters declared: “Everybody has the right to be suspicious in this country.”
Focusing specifically on the circumstances surrounding the 2020 election cycle, he noted that the pandemic had served as the justification to “blow out all of the signature requirements,” “blow out all the deadlines,” and “blast out all these unsolicited ballots into the ecosystem with no chain of custody.”
Furthermore, Watters declared that “state legislators had no power to do anything about it.”
For that reason, he concluded that when Trump received notifications from specific jurisdictions that there were election irregularities, he was justified in contesting those results.
“So, if someone sends you an affidavit and says, ‘There’s monkey business in Detroit,’ the president has every legal right to call the … Michigan state legislature and say, ‘Can you guys look into this? Maybe you want to send an alternative slate of electors for me.’”
Instead of blindly pursuing justice, however, critics of the latest indictment against Trump insist that it is merely more evidence of partisan bias within the federal justice system.
U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) offered her take on the latest development in a social media video uploaded Thursday.
“So today President Trump is being indicted in Washington, D.C. in a court with a jury of his so-called peers,” she said. “Those are not his peers. Everybody knows this. Everyone knows that he has no shot of a fair trial in the Washington, D.C. court system.”
She went on to note that Hillary Clinton claimed the 2016 election was stolen from her, followed by similar claims by failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in Georgia.
“Those who are holding the power and controlling, basically holding the power of the Constitution right now are putting the Constitution through a paper shredder by what they are doing with the Department of Justice,” Greene asserted.
