Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

 (By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

One insurrection, two impeachments, three indictments, three arrests in four months with a fourth pending. The only thing that's hard to keep count of is the growing number of charges. The four that Jack Smith filed a couple of days ago adds four more. So, is that 75 charges, 74? Who can tell? Isn't someone making and selling score cards or Bingo cards for this?

   People are already criticizing Smith for not including the insurrection but you have to parse the nuances of the four counts. Pay particular attention to the middle two counts: "Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding" and "Obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding". Starting and egging on a riot on a January 6th the year after a general election, or the certification of the Electoral College votes, would certainly fit the bill.

    Naturally, as per his arrest playbook, he's pretending to wallow in it, saying on Truth Social right before his latest arrest that he needs just one more indictment to win the presidency while saying at Reagan International at Arlington that it was a sad day in American history that he had to be arrested and indicted yet again. Also, as per his playbook, he claims he's being arrested and charged "for you", something not said even by Jesus when he was crucified for our sins.

    There's no word, yet, on whether his mouth-breathing supporters have caught on to the fact that, in reality, over 1100 of them have been arrested for him and that he never handed out a single pardon to any of them. And finally, he of course pleaded not guilty since he never claims responsibility or guilt for anything.

     Alina Habba placed herself in the ludicrous position of standing outside the courthouse and trying the case in the court of public opinion. She was relegated to the role of Parking Lot Barbie because she's not actually part of Trump's legal team in this affair. The highlight came when she whined that Trump "gave up his life" for you, the people. Lost on her was the irony that he squeezed in 18 holes of golf at Bedminster before hopping on his 757 jumbo jet so he could then almost immediately be released on his own recognizance before hopping back on that jet to fly back to his exclusive golf resort.

     There was outside the Prettyman courthouse various anti-Trump protesters. There was a guy in an inflatable Baby Trump suit. There were people with signs, some driving in from as far away as Pennsylvania. What it hardly had were Trump fans.

     

The Criminal Always Returns to the Scene of the Crime

Judge Magistrate Moxila Upadhyaya was prepared for Trump. After the charges were read and after Trump was allowed to plead not guilty, she read him the Riot Act. Essentially, she told Trump not to commit any crimes, otherwise violating the terms of his pretrial release would result in him being remanded back into custody. Since he still has Secret Service protection and is famously hostile to judges who don't let him have his way, it's impossible to see how that would happen in the certainty he does commit a crime such as intimidation or witness tampering.

    But the important thing is that she publicly put him on notice and informed him in no uncertain terms that she wasn't going to put up with his shit, even though her involvement ended yesterday with the arraignment. But it's not going to get any better for him (Surprise, surprise, he's already attacking Jack Smith Of course he is, prompting Mr. Smith to seek a protective order).

   The judge who was randomly assigned the case is U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee and a Black woman, which is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. As Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein wrote in Politico,

     "The Obama-appointed jurist ruled in fall 2021 that the House Jan. 6 select committee could access reams of Trump’s White House files — a ruling that was subsequently upheld by an appeals court and left undisturbed by the Supreme Court. That evidence — call logs, memos, internal strategy papers and more from the desks of Trump’s most trusted advisers — became the backbone of the committee’s evidence and shaped much of the public’s understanding of his effort to seize a second term he didn’t win."

      Trump's team had tried all the usual delay tactics. They tried to set the trial date back. They tried to have it set in, bizarrely, West Virginia, even though West Virginia has no connection whatsoever to this case. The answer was no and no. The judges are onto him and his usual spin and delay tactics, the veiled threats, everything but an actual defense are now well-known to these judges.

     And they, and Jack Smith, are having none of it.