Special counsel Jack Smith faces an ethics complaint filed by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik on Tuesday for allegedly attempting to “unlawfully interfere in the 2024 presidential election.”
“I just filed an official ethics complaint against Jack Smith with the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility for his illegal election interference,” said Stefanik on X.
“It’s obvious to any reasonable observer that Jack Smith is trying to interfere with the 2024 election and stop the American people from electing Donald Trump. At every turn, he has sought to accelerate his illegal prosecution of President Trump for the clear (if unstated) purpose of trying him before the November election,” continued Stefanik.
“The Justice Department’s own policies clearly prohibit Smith from doing so, and as a DOJ employee he is bound by those policies. Moreover, when the district court imposed a stay on the proceedings, Smith and his office ignored it and continued to file discovery documents. Smith’s conduct has brought disrepute to the Department of Justice and the entire federal government, and the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility should impose the discipline that such conduct warrants,” she said.
In June 2023, Biden’s special counsel, Jack Smith, obtained an indictment against President Donald Trump.
The indictment charges President Trump with various felonies stemming from the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. President Trump is currently the presumptive Republican contender for President, having received enough delegates to secure the nomination on March 12, 2024.
According to the complaint, Smith is pushing to speed up the trial in order to influence the general election in November.
This conduct violates Section 9-85.500 of the DOJ’s Justice Manual, according to Stefanik.
“Further, Jack Smith’s repeated violations of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia’s stay of proceedings are a lawless breach of trial ethics and lawyerly conduct,” Stefanik continued.
Last Thursday, Supreme Court justices appeared to suggest that they may grant former President Donald Trump a partial victory in his presidential immunity case by returning it to a lower court.
Dean John Sauer, Trump’s attorney, contended that presidents should have constitutional immunity from prosecution for public acts committed during their term.
Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh raised the possibility of the Supreme Court returning the case to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which could delay a trial on Trump’s election interference case until at least after the election.
In a unanimous decision issued on February 6, a three-judge appeals court panel dismissed Trump’s immunity claim in the lawsuit stemming from an indictment Smith obtained against the former president over his efforts to fight the 2020 election results.
Roberts asked Department of Justice (DOJ) Counselor to Smith, Michael Dreeben, on whether the appeals court and the DOJ were contending that Trump lacked immunity by default because he had been indicted.
“They said that there is no reason to worry because the prosecutor will act in good faith and there is no reason to worry because a grand jury will have returned the indictment,” Roberts said. “Now, you know how easy it is in many cases for a prosecutor to get a grand jury to bring an indictment and reliance on the good faith of the prosecutor may not be enough in some cases, I‘m not suggesting here, so if it’s tautological, if those are the only protections the court gave that is no longer your position, you are not defending that position, why shouldn’t we send it back to the court of appeals or issue an opinion making clear that that’s not the law?”
“Well, I am defending the court of appeals’ judgment and I do think there are layered safeguards the court can take into account that will ameliorate concerns about unduly chilling presidential conduct,” Dreeben responded. “That concerns us. We are not endorsing a regime that we think would expose former presidents to criminal prosecutions in bad faith, for political animus, without adequate evidence. A politically driven prosecution would violate the Constitution… It’s is not something within the arsenal of prosecutors to do.”
Furthermore, Justice Amy Coney Barrett hinted at the prospect of establishing a criteria for presidential immunity from prosecution that isn’t nearly absolute, which may cause delays if lower courts rule on it.
Justice Clarence Thomas questioned Dreeben on why no other president has faced indictment before Trump.
“Over the not-so-distant past … certain presidents have engaged in various activity, coups or operations like Operation Mongoose, when I was a teenager, and yet there were no prosecutions,” Thomas said. “Why? If what you’re saying is right, it would seem that would have been ripe for criminal prosecution of someone.”
“So Justice Thomas, I think this is a central question,” Dreeben responded. “The reason why there have not been prior criminal prosecutions is that there were not crimes.”
Read: Jonathan Turley Says Alvin Bragg Is Making Trump’s Immunity Case ‘For Him’
After presenting Sauer with a hypothetical, Justice Elena Kagan described his claim that a president may have criminal immunity for conducting a coup as “sound[ing] bad,” which Trump’s lawyer concurred with.
“It certainly sounds very bad, and that’s why the framers have a whole series of structural checks that have successfully, for the last two hundred and thirty-four years, prevented that very kind of extreme hypothetical. And that is the wisdom of the framers,” Trump’s attorney argued.
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