Special counsel Jack Smith made a lot of noise on Aug. 4 by requesting a “protective order” against big, bad Donald Trump because the former president posted “If you go after me, I’m coming after you" on Truth Social.
While the request sounds like the usual grandstanding, Smith may actually have something to fear from our 45th president, although it may not be exactly what he intends to convey here.
Indeed, it may be far more significant than mere social media puffery in the end.
The actual 2020 presidential vote results, in which fewer and fewer of our citizens have confidence, have been called to question.
Given the nature of his indictment of Mr. Trump related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach, it seems the special counsel has opened the door to putting the 2020 presidential election on trial. Mr. Smith’s indictment depends on proving that Mr. Trump was lying when he said the vote was fraudulent. Well, we’ll see.
The mainstream media and their new best friend, former Attorney General William Barr, assure us these same charges will finally be the end for Mr. Trump. (Other legal minds—notably Jonathan Turley, Alan Dershowitz, and Andrew C. McCarthy—differ.)
At the same time, regarding Jan. 6 itself, a hitherto-unseen Tucker Carlson interview with former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund has surfaced. Mr. Sund was fired shortly after Jan. 6 by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Mr. Sund told Mr. Carlson that the supposed insurrection was “crawling with feds” to a degree he had never seen in more than 30 years as a police officer—18 FBI undercover personnel, plus an additional 20 agents from the Department of Homeland Security.
In addition, Ms. Pelosi had already refused Mr. Trump’s offer of 10,000 National Guard troops.
What may lie ahead of us, however, through these Jan. 6-related charges, is finally achieving some understanding of what actually happened in 2020, finally getting to a truth that would be accepted, if not by all, by enough of our citizens to move forward as a nation without thinking we’ve become a banana republic.
That’s the best-case scenario. The worst case, of course, is continued omertà—code of silence—from the Department of Justice and its media allies.
The one most responsible for that omertà, or at least the one to give it credence, is arguably the aforementioned Mr. Barr. It was he who less than a month after Election Day 2020 announced that his Justice Department hadn’t found sufficient evidence of fraud to have affected the election.
How did he know that in such a short time in a country with a population of more than 330 million divided among 50 states, each of which, according to its Constitution, controlled its own election laws through its state legislature and many of which have totally different voting systems?
He didn’t tell us then and he still hasn’t.
As the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko put it, “When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.”
