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Is DOJ Special Council Jack Smith a fanatic? That is the central tenet of a column by National Review Editor-in-Chief Rich Lowry, who feels that indicting Donald Trump is Smith’s obsession. Lowry, who explained the logic behind his argument on 710 WOR’s Len Berman and Michael Riedel in the Morning program, feels Smith’s desire to get Trump may simply boil down to one word: hatred.
“I think we saw some of it in [Smith’s] statement that he made last week,” Lowry told Berman and Riedel. “You really hate what Trump did on January 6th- which is understandable, you know, I hate it, too- but I’m not a prosecutor, whose role is to just do by-the-books law enforcement. So, I think he shares a Liz Cheney kind of hatred for Trump, and a lot of people feel that way. They feel that way for understandable reasons, but it shouldn’t be distorting the law, and I think that’s what happened here.”
Lowry added that Smith’s case is a difficult one to prove because it requires knowing what went on in Trump’s state of mind on January 6th. “Incitement’s a very specific thing as a matter of law, and just saying ‘do it peacefully’, which he did, is enough to get him off legally. Now, morally, it’s still absolutely wrong, what he did that day, but not everything that’s wrong is a crime. So even Jack Smith realized he couldn’t go there, so instead he’s come up with this elaborate theory of fraud... proving it in a court beyond a reasonable doubt, that he was lying with everything he said, I think is going to be really tough.”
Lowry also touched upon a much easier hurdle for Trump to clear- the implosion of Ron DeSantis’s quest to be the GOP’s nominee in 2024. “He’s intimately involved in his campaign, obviously. All these mistakes go to him, and he hasn’t performed very well… There’s a chance he gets better out there on the campaign trail. There’s a chance something happens to Trump. I don’t know what that would be; maybe at the end, all the indictments kinda drag him down a little but, at the moment, it’s just not a competitive race.”
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