An ugly strain of anti-press hatred is stalking the nation.

The latest victim of this poisonous, anti-democratic virus is a small-town newspaper in Kansas.

On Friday, local police, acting like the Gestapo, raided the office of the Marion County Record, as well as the home of its owner and publisher. They used a trumped-up search warrant approved by a compliant local judge to seize newsgathering equipment, including the computers and cellphones of reporters. The raid was so traumatic that the publisher’s 98-year-old mother, who was the newspaper’s co-owner, died on Saturday as a result.

The police were trying to suppress the truth that the newspaper had uncovered about a local restaurant owner who hosted an event for the region’s far-right member of Congress, Rep. Jake LaTurner.

The Marion County Record was doing basic accountability reporting, the lifeblood of small-town journalism.

It has always taken courage to run independent newspapers in small towns and mid-sized cities in America. For generations, politicians and business leaders have fought back against aggressive coverage by local newspapers and have frequently made life difficult for publishers and reporters. Almost every reporter who has ever worked for a small newspaper has experienced resistance from the local power structure. I experienced a bit of it myself during my first job in journalism.

As a young reporter in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the late 1970s, I wrote a story revealing that local banks were not making mortgage loans in the Black community. In response, the biggest bank in town took out full-page ads in the newspaper for two days straight attacking my story. Thankfully, the paper’s top editor backed me up; the day the bank’s first ad ran, he walked past my desk in the newsroom and said simply, “Thanks for the extra ad revenue.”

But things have gotten much worse over the past few years. Hatred of the press has deepened on the extreme right, stoked by Donald Trump and his paranoid acolytes. Trump labeled the press the “enemy of the people,” a fascist slogan that has now seeped into common usage on the right. Physical attacks on journalists in the United States are becoming more common and are now a signature of right-wing extremism; reporters who covered the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol were assaulted and had their equipment damaged.

Eric Meyer, the owner and publisher of the Marion County Record, was stunned by Friday’s raid, which involved the town’s entire five-member police force and two sheriff’s deputies. He told the Kansas Reflector that the message from police and the local political establishment was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”

It is probably not surprising that the local establishment that is attacking the Marion County Record is at the same time supporting an extreme right-winger like LaTurner, who has not commented on the raid on his Twitter account. Meyer told the Associated Press that “this is the type of stuff that, you know, that Vladimir Putin does, that Third World dictators do.”

(The Intercept and other news organizations signed a letter from Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press condemning the raid.)

The unjustified assault on the Marion County Record is another reminder that press freedom is one of the most important democratic traditions under threat from Trumpism.

The post Anti-Press Hatred Is Alive and Well in Kansas appeared first on The Intercept .

The Republican Party has devolved into a cult of personality, where every new piece of evidence of their leader’s criminality becomes another reason for his followers to defend him. Donald Trump has now been indicted twice in just over two months, in separate cases involving accusations of unrelated crimes. Both times, Republicans have rallied around him. The group of whiners and weaklings who are running against Trump for next year’s Republican presidential nomination are so intimidated by his hold on the party’s base that they are afraid to publicly tell the truth, which is that Trump is a thug who should be in prison instead of the White House.

How many indictments will it take to wake Republicans from their fever dream?

Trump was indicted in April on New York state charges in connection with campaign finance violations involving hush money payments to a former porn star; his most recent charges, in an indictment released Friday, involve his efforts to keep and hide classified documents after his presidency.

And yet, this is just the beginning of Trump’s legal woes. The most serious criminal investigations of Trump that are now underway have not yet led to charges — but that could soon change. Trump faces the very real possibility that he will be indicted at least two more times this year, in cases related to his efforts to illegally overturn the 2020 presidential election. In Georgia, he could be charged later this summer for his efforts to change the outcome of the presidential election in the state, which Joe Biden won. A separate federal investigation is underway into Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and his broader efforts to overturn the presidential election.

Criminal charges aren’t Trump’s only legal problems. The state of New York has filed a civil lawsuit against him — along with three of his children and his company, the Trump Organization — alleging that, for decades, they engaged in a wide range of fraudulent business practices.

In addition, Trump has just lost another civil lawsuit in New York brought by E. Jean Carroll, a writer who alleged that Trump raped her in a department store in 1996, and then defamed her when he denied the accusation. In May, a jury awarded Carroll $5 million in damages; she has since asked a judge to amend her lawsuit so she can seek further damages after Trump made statements during a CNN broadcast in May that she says defamed her once again.

While he was in office, of course, Trump was also the first president ever to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives, in two separate cases. In December 2019, the House voted in favor of two articles of impeachment, charging Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in connection with his efforts to blackmail Ukrainian officials by withholding U.S. military aid to get them to falsely accuse Biden of corruption. At the time, Trump saw Biden as his most formidable Democratic opponent in the upcoming 2020 election, and he believed that an announcement of a criminal investigation of Biden in Ukraine would damage his rival’s candidacy.

Trump was impeached a second time in January 2021, just as he was leaving office, in a case in which the House charged Trump with “incitement of insurrection” for urging his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol, which led to the January 6 riot.

None of those legal matters involve the true OG of Trump cases: what has gone down in history as the Mueller investigation. From 2017 until 2019, former FBI Director Robert Mueller led a special counsel inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in order to help Trump win, probing whether Trump or any of his campaign aides or allies collaborated with the Russians. The inquiry found multiple connections between Trump allies and Russian officials and intelligence agents, while also uncovering strong evidence of obstruction of justice by Trump , who was seeking to impede Mueller’s inquiry.

Mueller did not issue criminal charges against Trump, but he made it clear that Trump could have been charged with obstruction if he had not been the sitting president at the time. In his final report, Mueller pointed to a Justice Department guideline against federal indictments of sitting presidents, strongly suggesting that was the only reason he didn’t charge Trump with obstruction. He later told Congress that a president could be charged with obstruction of justice after he left office, but the Biden administration has not revived those charges.

None of the legal cases address Trump’s unrelenting racist demagoguery, his mentally unbalanced embrace of conspiracy theories, or his casual use of lies and disinformation to defend himself and attack his enemies. In 2021, the Washington Post’s fact-checking team concluded that Trump had made 30,573 false or misleading claims over the four years of his presidency.

Will four criminal indictments, a wide-ranging civil fraud case, a civil sexual abuse and defamation verdict, two impeachments, a stalled obstruction of justice case, and 30,573 lies be enough to wake up Republicans?

During the early days of his 2016 presidential campaign, after he began to attract huge crowds of zealous supporters, Trump famously said that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

He is currently testing that theory. So far, the Republican Party is proving him right.

The post How Many Indictments Does It Take to Bring Down a Cult Leader? appeared first on The Intercept .

Get ready for the MAGA Christian nationalist crowd to make the connection between Donald Trump’s surrender to New York authorities next Tuesday and Holy Week. Next Tuesday is Holy Tuesday, and the parallels will write themselves. Any Christian nationalist minister who fails to draw the comparison should have his Venmo account suspended.

Trump is expected to turn himself in and appear in court in Manhattan on Tuesday following his indictment by a New York grand jury. The indictment is still sealed, so the charges against the former president are not yet public. But the grand jury had been hearing evidence about hush-money payments made to former porn star Stormy Daniels during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Holy Week, which begins this Sunday, is the most important week of the year in the Christian calendar. Beginning with Palm Sunday, on April 2, and ending with Holy Saturday, on April 8, it follows the narrative of the Passion of Christ, from his triumphal entry into Jerusalem through the Last Supper, his betrayal, arrest, crucifixion, and death. Christ’s resurrection follows on Easter, which falls this year on April 9.

Holy Tuesday is one of the least important days of Holy Week, but it still counts.

In the upside-down world of the Christian nationalists at the heart of the MAGA subculture, Donald Trump — a porn-star-fucking, Putin-loving, psychopathic liar and traitorous crook who is running for president again just to stay out of jail, grift more dollars, wreak more havoc, and seek further revenge against his enemies — is a Christ-like figure. Of course, they will see him as a martyr straight out of the Bible.

It would probably be better for the Christian nationalists of MAGA world if Trump surrendered next Friday, which is Good Friday, the day when believers observe Christ’s crucifixion. Holy Tuesday is a middle-of-the-week drudge day of Holy Week, and biblical scholars have spent a millennium trying to piece together what they think Jesus was doing that day. But the generally accepted version of what happened on Holy Tuesday will still fit nicely into the narrative of victimhood and righteousness that Christian nationalists have built around Trump.

After his entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, when the joyful crowd threw palms in front of his donkey to smooth his path, Jesus cleansed the Temple of Jerusalem on Holy Monday, overturning the tables of the moneychangers.

Holy Tuesday was a day of testing for Jesus. As he entered the temple, according to the Gospel of Matthew, “the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching, and said, ‘By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?’”

Jesus had an answer ready:

“Have you never read in the Scriptures: ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing and it is marvelous in our eyes’? Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.

“When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they perceived that he was speaking about them. And although they were seeking to arrest him, they feared the crowds, because they held him to be a prophet.”

The MAGA crowd has frequently compared Trump to Jesus, and now they are beginning to make the connection between Trump’s latest legal problems, Jesus Christ, and the liturgical calendar .

In fact, the right-wing outrage that erupted after Trump’s indictment in New York was disclosed on Thursday has already taken on an apocalyptic tenor, and MAGA-world characters are beginning to fill their biblical roles. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who has come to symbolize MAGA in Congress, immediately vowed to go to New York to support Trump; she seems to be fulfilling the role of Mary Magdalene, who washed Christ’s feet with her tears and later witnessed his crucifixion. Of course, Michael Cohen, Trump’s onetime lawyer and the star witness against him in the New York case, is being cast by MAGA world as Judas. What could be better for Trump than to have a MAGA minister standing outside the courthouse on Tuesday quoting Matthew?

The problem for the Christian nationalists is that they may have to defend Trump at least four times. In addition to the New York case, Trump is also facing two federal criminal investigations and another in Georgia.

If he is charged in all four cases, where in the Bible will Christian nationalists seek guidance?

The post With a Holy Week Indictment, Donald Trump Is Entering Jesus Territory appeared first on The Intercept .

Members of the United States Senate are patting themselves on the back. They officially just voted to end the war in Iraq — sort of.

The Senate voted Wednesday to repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force for the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the legislation is being praised by its supporters in the Senate as a reassertion of the war-making powers of Congress. “This vote shows that Congress is prepared to call back our constitutional role in deciding how and when a nation goes to war,” said Sen. Bob Menendez , the New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, and Republican Todd Young of Indiana, argued that the vote sent a signal that the American people are still in charge when it comes to deciding when to go to war.

But the Senate vote came 20 years too late. It was as if Congress had voted to end the Vietnam War in the 1990s.

U.S. counterterrorism operations around the world, including drone strikes and Special Operations raids, will not be affected, even in Iraq.

It was a symbolic vote, not an act of courage. It was a historical artifact, like endorsing a new monument honoring the war’s dead. It came just days after the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion, and, even if passed by the House and signed into law by President Joe Biden, it will have no impact on any ongoing U.S. military operations in Iraq or anywhere else. American combat operations ended in Iraq years ago, and there are now only about 2,500 U.S. military personnel in the country, acting as trainers and advisers to Iraqi forces; their work in Iraq will continue uninterrupted. U.S. counterterrorism operations around the world, including drone strikes and Special Operations raids, will not be affected, even in Iraq; the broader 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force in the war on terrorism remains intact .

As if to underscore the abstract nature of Wednesday’s vote, the Senate threw in a repeal of the authorization for the 1991 Persian Gulf War for good measure.

The vote was so meaningless that it was not really a reassertion of Congress’s constitutional authority over matters of war and peace. The congressional battle over the Iraq war that really mattered took place 16 years ago, in 2007, when the debate in the Senate involved a young Democratic senator from Illinois named Barack Obama and the veteran chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee , Joe Biden.

That congressional battle had truly high stakes, and it went very badly for the war’s opponents. They failed to end the war, and the conflict raged on for years.

Following the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, the Bush administration ginned up support for going to war in Iraq by spreading a White House-sanctioned conspiracy theory that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks. They followed that up with misleading claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In October 2002, Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force with significant bipartisan support, and President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Bush won reelection in 2004, but the war turned so grim and bloody that the 2006 midterm elections became a referendum on Iraq. The Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate in November 2006, leading to a showdown beginning in early 2007 between Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress over Iraq.

The Democrats wanted the United States to begin withdrawing troops, but Bush wanted to escalate the war, and he wanted Congress to pay for it. The two sides dug in.

As the months passed, Democratic leaders struggled with how to force Bush to set a timetable for withdrawal without looking like they were withholding funds needed to support American troops in the field. “We’re not about to cut off funding for troops,” Rep. Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat who was chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said at the time . “That would be injurious to our troops and their families.”

In February 2007, Obama announced that he was running for president, and his views on Iraq at the time were clearly influenced by his fledgling campaign. He had been an early opponent of the war, which would prove to be an advantage in the Democratic primaries, yet he was also trying to carefully calibrate his language and his votes so as to avoid any political damage that would come from appearing not to support U.S. troops. When he was asked at the time if he could find a way to support American soldiers while not paying for Bush’s escalation, Obama said : “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. My understanding so far is that we can do it constitutionally, but as a practical matter if the president chooses to go ahead with a deployment and then simply runs out of money halfway through and those troops are already there, then you start getting into a game of chicken. That is the big dilemma in trying to figure out what mechanism we can use to stop what I’m convinced is the wrong policy, without shortchanging the young men and women who’ve already been deployed.” Obama’s comments at the time provided an early sign of his excessively cautious approach to national security as president.

Biden, then the influential chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, dismissed the idea of only paying for some operations in Iraq. “We have a standing army with a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. You can’t go in and, like a tinker toy, and play around and say, ‘You can’t spend the money on this piece and this piece.’” Biden’s comments were probably a rebuke of Obama, a presidential rival at the time; Biden announced he was running for president in January 2007, not long before Obama.

In the end, Congress backed down. Bush vetoed Democratic-backed legislation that would have set a deadline for the start of troop withdrawals, and the Democrats lacked the votes to override the veto. Next, Bush won the game of chicken that Obama had warned about. With money for the war about to run dry, Congress approved another $100 billion in Iraq war funding; Bush signed that bill in May 2007.

Congress never again came as close to ending the war in Iraq on its own.

Until Wednesday.

The post The Anti-War Vote That Came 20 Years Late appeared first on The Intercept .

The U.S. Army began to strip its bases of their old Confederate names last week, as Donald Trump faced a possible criminal indictment. The timing was hardly a coincidence.

Neither reckoning would have been possible if Trump were still president. Both have been winding their way through the government bureaucracy for the past two years since Trump left office and are now happening at the same time as part of a growing repudiation of Trump and Trumpism.

The big question is whether Trump, who held a surreal rally in Waco on Saturday, can stage a comeback and halt the nation’s efforts to move on, or whether he will finally be thrown into history’s dustbin.

Trump’s Waco event, the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign, where thousands of MAGA zealots cheered as the ex-president raged, came one day after a much smaller but more significant event on an Army base in Virginia.

At a modest ceremony on Friday, Fort Pickett, named for Confederate Gen. George Pickett, remembered as the losing commander of “Pickett’s Charge,” the doomed Confederate assault on Union lines at the battle of Gettysburg, was officially renamed Fort Barfoot, in honor of Col. Van T. Barfoot, who won the Medal of Honor in Italy during World War II. Barfoot received the medal for his actions on May 23, 1944, when he single-handedly took out three German machine gun nests, capturing 17 German soldiers, and then blew up a German tank with a bazooka.

It was the first time a U.S. Army base named for a Confederate had been renamed, marking an official repudiation of white supremacy by the U.S. military. Fort Pickett, now Fort Barfoot, is the first of nine Army bases scheduled to be renamed this year, as the Pentagon moves to purge the military of its tradition of commemorating Confederate fighters. The bases were originally named when they were built in the South in the first half of the 20th century. At the time, the Army agreed to name them after Confederates to satisfy white Southern leaders, whose demands were part of a broader reassertion of Southern white supremacy during the Jim Crow era.

The Pentagon resisted calls to change the base names for years. They refused to do so after a 2015 shooting by a white supremacist at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, killed nine people, and again after the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Pressure grew more intense following the social protest movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd in 2020, but Trump, then president, fiercely opposed the idea. Claiming that the Confederate names were part of the nation’s heritage, he attacked the Pentagon for even considering any changes. In June 2020, Trump tweeted : “These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.” In an interview with Fox News at the time, he said: “We won two world wars, two world wars, beautiful world wars that were vicious and horrible, and we won them out of Fort Bragg, we won them out of all of these forts. And now they want to throw those names away.”

After Trump was defeated in 2020, he vetoed legislation creating a commission to rename the bases, but Congress was finally able to override it. If Trump had been reelected, he almost certainly would have continued trying to obstruct the renaming efforts.

With Trump gone, the commission completed its work, and many of the nation’s largest and most prominent military bases will get new names this year; Fort Bragg in North Carolina, the base Trump talked about in 2020, will be renamed Fort Liberty at an event tentatively scheduled for June.

The renaming of Fort Pickett last week prompted no protests and hardly a murmur of criticism, apart from a few nasty comments on the Facebook page of the Virginia National Guard, which uses the base. Indeed, the lack of outrage seems to be one more small sign that Trump’s power, and his ability to generate anger outside of his devoted base, are waning.

Trump’s mounting legal problems pose a more direct threat to his power and are a more personal form of reckoning. Although some Republican pundits and political figures have claimed that Trump will regain political strength by being indicted, the ex-president’s own fury at the prospect, which was on full display in Waco, reveals the truth: Trump is deeply afraid of ending up in prison.

He has spent his life exploiting legal loopholes and has often succeeded by outlasting his opponents. But his victories have mostly come in civil lawsuits when he was in business or while he was president and controlled the Justice Department . He has never faced the kind of legal peril that he does now .

The threat seems to be driving him even further around the bend than ever before. He now openly engages in full-throated conspiracy theories while inciting violence against his opponents; he held his rally in Waco knowing that it was scheduled in the middle of the 30th anniversary of the federal siege of the Branch Davidian compound there , which ended with a deadly government raid and fire that has taken on deep symbolism among violent, far-right extremists.

Trump is so obsessed with the criminal investigations against him — there are now at least four underway — that he talks about little else in public. Last week, he viciously attacked Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who seems likely to seek an indictment of Trump in connection with an alleged $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump’s rhetoric is once again inciting his rabid supporters, just as it did during the January 6 insurrection. After Trump publicly attacked Bragg last week, calling him, among many other things, a “degenerate psychopath,” Bragg’s office received an envelope containing white powder and a typewritten death threat that stated “ALVIN: I AM GOING TO KILL YOU,” followed by 13 exclamation points, according to The New York Times .

Trump’s public descent into vengeful fury plays well with his rage-fueled base. Other Republican politicians — even his likely GOP opponents in the 2024 presidential race, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — are still so intimidated by Trump’s hold on the MAGA crowd that they refuse to confront him, so he may yet win the Republican presidential nomination.

But this time, he may be forced to campaign from a prison cell.

The post America May Finally Be Done With Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept .

Paul Wolfowitz walked among the tombstones of the Iraq war dead.

It was April 9, 2009, and Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense in the Bush administration and one of the chief architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, had come to Arlington National Cemetery to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad.

He came to Section 60, the portion of Arlington where American soldiers who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan lay buried, as the most prominent guest at a small ceremony to mark the day six years earlier when the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square had been pulled down. Wolfowitz and other Iraq war hawks had decided that April 9 should be commemorated as “Iraq Liberation Day.”

The 2009 celebration was organized and hosted by Viola Drath, a former journalist, longtime socialite, and, at 89, a tireless networker on Washington’s cocktail circuit.

She was now married to her second husband, Albrecht Muth, who claimed to be a general in the Iraqi Army. He wore his uniform to public events around Washington and possessed a certificate of his appointment signed by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Using her Washington connections, Drath had managed to attract a smattering of VIPs to Section 60 for the Iraq Liberation Day ceremony, including both Wolfowitz and Iraq’s ambassador to the United States at the time, Samir Shakir M. Sumaida’ie.

Two years after that celebration in Section 60, Drath was found dead in her Georgetown townhouse. She had been strangled. Her husband, Muth, the supposed Iraqi general, was arrested for her murder. The certificate of his appointment as an Iraqi general was found to be a forgery; in Drath’s townhouse, police discovered a receipt from a Washington print shop where he had created the official-looking document. Muth was later convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison .

Two decades after the March 19, 2003, U.S. invasion of Iraq, it is still difficult to peel back all the layers of deceit that enveloped the war. Some were thin and nearly transparent, like the fabricated generalship of Albrecht Muth. Others were enormously consequential, like the false assertion, peddled by the White House, the CIA, and the American press, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. There was also much self-deceit, like the notion confidently shared by the war’s most ardent supporters that April 9 would forever be remembered as Iraq Liberation Day.

But one piece of deceit and disinformation stands out. Along with other official lies, it morphed into a lasting conspiracy theory that set a dangerous precedent and helped pave the way for the rise of Donald Trump: the assertion by the Bush White House that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

Bush and his advisers saw the Saddam–9/11 connection as the silver bullet that could guarantee public support for an invasion of Iraq.

There was never any evidence that it was true, and the Bush administration knew it had nothing to support the claims. Yet the White House began to push the theory almost immediately after the September 11 attacks; President George W. Bush and his advisers saw the Saddam–9/11 connection as the silver bullet that could guarantee public support for an invasion of Iraq.

The Bush team pushed the false notion with such unrelenting ferocity during the 18 months between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion that most Americans were soon convinced. Efforts by the press to debunk it made little difference. It was a powerful piece of disinformation that became so deeply embedded in the American consciousness that it was nearly impossible to dislodge.

The Bush White House was so successful that two years after 9/11, polls showed that nearly 70 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was involved in the attacks on New York and Washington. By 2007, despite the administration’s failure to find proof of the connection over the previous six years, polls revealed that one-third of Americans still believed it .

The equally specious argument that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction never enjoyed such a powerful hold on the American imagination as the belief that the war in Iraq could be justified as payback for 9/11.

It was a powerful piece of disinformation that became so deeply embedded in the American consciousness that it was nearly impossible to dislodge.

As with any good propaganda campaign, the Bush team was careful and lawyerly in making its case. In his public statements, Bush himself never explicitly said Saddam was responsible for 9/11; but he constantly used language in speeches and other public statements linking Saddam with terrorism, and he talked more broadly about connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda-style militancy. The Bush team did a masterful job of making it difficult for the public to distinguish between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. The public got the message that 9/11 and Iraq were inextricably linked.

The Bush White House kept pushing the false narrative surrounding a Saddam–9/11 connection despite resistance from the Central Intelligence Agency, where some officials were quietly furious at these dubious claims. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, some CIA officials, speaking anonymously, told reporters that the intelligence didn’t support the White House notion of a Saddam–9/11 connection.

The battle between the Bush White House and the CIA over the intelligence on Saddam’s connections to 9/11 and terrorism consumed much of the 18-month interregnum between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion and turned increasingly bitter after Vice President Dick Cheney personally visited CIA headquarters and, along with his aides, began to pressure analysts to agree to the White House position. But the battle was waged almost entirely behind the scenes; it would surface only through occasional anonymous leaks to the press from CIA officials, accusing the administration of politicizing the intelligence, and conversely through statements from Iraq hawks close to the administration complaining about CIA intransigence.

The agency’s stance was badly weakened when CIA Director George Tenet refused to publicly engage in the battle, or even to criticize the Bush White House for pushing the Iraq–Al Qaeda link. At the time, Tenet’s hold on his job was fragile, and he believed he owed Bush for not firing him after the intelligence failures related to 9/11 prompted many critics to call for his ouster. In fact, there were several instances when CIA officials, speaking on background without attribution, would discuss the lack of an Iraq–Al Qaeda connection with reporters, only to see Tenet then publicly deny that there was any disagreement between the White House and the CIA, including when he was questioned by Congress. Tenet’s actions thus left CIA dissenters badly exposed to political pressure.

In the years since the U.S. invasion, this secret war between the White House and CIA over evidence of Iraq–Al Qaeda links has largely been lost to history, overshadowed by the subsequent debacle over intelligence on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, and by the failure of the war itself. But the 2002 White House–CIA fight over Iraq–Al Qaeda intelligence nonetheless wreaked lasting damage, creating a model for Trump in how to build conspiracy theories around intelligence reporting.

Rather than concede that the CIA analysts might be right that there was no proof of Saddam–9/11, Iraq–Al Qaeda connections, the Bush team created a rival intelligence unit of their own to hunt for the evidence they claimed the CIA was ignoring. A two-man intelligence team, handpicked by Iraq hawk Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy and one of Wolfowitz’s lieutenants, set up shop in the Pentagon and began scouring raw intelligence for signs of a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

The amateurish effort was linked to Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative close to Wolfowitz, and a longtime critic of the CIA. Perle told me at the time that he thought the “people working on the Persian Gulf at the CIA are pathetic,” and that “they went to battle stations every time someone pointed to contrary evidence.”

Feith’s Pentagon team never proved their case. But the Bush White House became convinced they had found their silver bullet when they obtained a report claiming that Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague just months before the September 11 attacks.

Before long, the “Prague meeting” became the central piece of evidence used by the Bush team in their push for war. It seemed to provide the long-sought missing link between Saddam and 9/11. For the Bush White House, it was the perfect intelligence report.

The problem was that the meeting never happened . Yet the Bush White House kept peddling the story.

The battle to stop the White House from using the Saddam–9/11 connection to justify war with Iraq exhausted battered CIA officials and analysts. The fight so weakened the CIA that by the fall of 2002, Tenet and his top lieutenants were relieved when the Bush team finally began to switch the focus of its argument for war to Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Tenet was so intimidated by the fallout from the fight over the intelligence on connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda that he was eager to cooperate with the White House on WMD. After all, there were plenty of old intelligence reports, dating back to the 1990s when United Nations weapons inspectors had been in Iraq, that strongly suggested Saddam had WMD. There was even a sense of guilt that still ran through the CIA over the fact that, at the time of the Gulf War in 1991, the agency had failed to detect evidence of Iraq’s fledgling nuclear weapons program. That the CIA had almost no new intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs since at least 1998, when U.N. weapons inspectors had been withdrawn from Iraq, was largely ignored by Tenet and most senior CIA officials; they didn’t want to admit that they had been dependent on the U.N. To account for a gap of at least five years in much of the intelligence reporting on Iraqi WMD programs, the CIA assumed the worst: that the weapons programs detected in the 1990s had only grown stronger and more dangerous.

Whenever intelligence was collected that countered this narrative, CIA officials discredited the sources or simply ignored it. In 2002, for example, the CIA sent more than 30 Iraqi American relatives of Iraqi weapons scientists back to Iraq to secretly ask about the status of Saddam’s WMD programs. All the relatives reported back to the CIA that their relatives had said that the WMD programs had long since been ended. The CIA simply ignored those reports .

By contrast, any new nugget of information suggesting that Iraq still had WMD was treated like gold dust inside the CIA. Ambitious analysts quickly learned that the fastest way to get ahead was to write reports proving the existence of Iraqi WMD programs. Their reports would be quickly given to Tenet, who would loudly praise the reporting and then rush it to the White House — which would then leak it to the press. The result was a constant stream of stories about aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapons laboratories, and nerve gas produced and shared with terrorists.

Dissent within the CIA over the WMD intelligence was much weaker than it had been on the Saddam–9/11 connection. Now, the hardy few critics of the intelligence were not only fighting the White House, but also their own management, which was fully on board with WMD. Whenever they were confronted by the few CIA skeptics who noted that the intelligence on WMD was thin, Tenet and his lieutenants would say that they “would find it when we get there” — after the invasion. And Tenet and his aides would point to Saddam’s refusal to meet Bush’s demands to allow Western weapons inspectors back into Iraq. That had to be proof that he was still hiding covert WMD programs; they never allowed for the possibility that Saddam was bluffing and didn’t want to admit his own weakness.

The CIA’s utter failure on WMD intelligence ultimately cost Tenet his job and poisoned American attitudes toward the war in Iraq. Yet the Bush administration’s persistence in pushing the obviously false narrative of a connection between Saddam and 9/11 may have had more lasting consequences for American politics. Bush set a precedent by officially sanctioning a conspiracy theory. His White House had engaged in a bitter battle with intelligence analysts, who Bush’s lieutenants and most ardent supporters saw as the enemy, to disseminate that conspiracy theory.

Bush set a precedent by officially sanctioning a conspiracy theory.

Donald Trump followed that model when he sought to convince Americans that he had won the 2020 presidential election, but that dark forces — including a “deep state” inside the U.S. intelligence community — had rigged the outcome to make Joe Biden president.

George W. Bush helped lay the groundwork for Trump to engage in conspiracy theories and spread them from the Oval Office. There is a direct line from the Prague meeting to “Stop the Steal,” and from March 19, 2003, to January 6, 2021.

The post Bush’s Iraq War Lies Served as a Blueprint For Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept .

In one of their very first steps since taking over the House of Representatives, House Republicans have created a special new panel to launch wide-ranging investigations into what they allege are the ways in which the federal government has abused the rights of conservatives.

But Republicans and right-wing pundits have already given up on its clumsy formal title — “ the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government ” — and are now simply calling it the new “Church Committee.” By doing so, they are explicitly comparing it to the historic Church Committee of the mid-1970s, which conducted landmark investigations of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the rest of the intelligence community, none of which had previously been subject to real oversight.

The new “weaponization” subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee will be chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, a right-wing ally of former President Donald Trump, and has a much different objective than the original Church Committee: The panel is widely expected to become a pro-Trump star chamber, investigating the officials and organizations that have previously investigated Trump, including the FBI and the Justice Department.

The Jordan subcommittee also seems likely to investigate the House January 6 committee, which operated when the Democrats controlled the chamber — and referred Jordan to the House Ethics Committee for his involvement in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Jordan, who stuck by Rep. Kevin McCarthy during McCarthy’s marathon bid to become House speaker last week, is now being rewarded with the mandate and resources to conduct investigations into almost any corner of the government he chooses; those probes have the potential to make the Biden administration look bad or Trump look good. McCarthy has even authorized the subcommittee to examine ongoing criminal investigations, which the Justice Department will certainly oppose.

By calling their panel the new Church Committee, Jordan and the Republicans are trying to assume the mantle of one of the most iconic investigative committees in congressional history. (I’ve spent the last several years researching and writing a book about Sen. Frank Church and his eponymous panel, which will be published in May.)

“When you reach back in history and bring a phrase from the past to the present, you get to carry a meaning into contemporary time,” observed Stephanie Martin, the Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs at Boise State University in Idaho, the native state of Sen. Church, the Democrat who chaired the original Church Committee. “By calling it the Church Committee,” she added, Republicans are appropriating the image “of effective change and effective oversight.”

But the differences between the Church Committee and Jordan’s new subcommittee are stark, observes Loch Johnson, who served as an aide to Church on the committee and later wrote a firsthand account of the committee’s work. “The Church Committee was strongly oriented toward following the documentary evidence that we were able to uncover,” says Johnson. “The inquiry was driven not by ideology, revenge, or anything else but the facts.” Today’s Republicans, he added, seem “motivated by ideology and a sense of grievance, starting with the ‘stolen election’ of 2020.”

Johnson and others argue that what the Republicans are creating is unlikely to be anything like the Church Committee, especially if, as seems almost certain, it descends into conspiracy theories about a mythical “deep state” that is out to get Trump and conservatives.

The existence of an anti-Trump “deep state” has become one of the most persistent conspiracy theories on the right and feeds into the anger and resentment against the government held by pro-Trump forces, including Jordan. Like all powerful and lasting conspiracy theories, it relies on some basic facts — but then turns reality on its head to reach a fantastical conclusion.

It is true that America is burdened with a sprawling and ever-growing military-industrial complex built on a network of relationships linking the Pentagon; the CIA; Homeland Security; defense, intelligence, and counterterrorism contractors; and many others in a powerful and partially hidden web that, over the past few decades, has pushed the nation into a period of nearly endless war. The traditional post-World War II military-industrial complex grew steadily for decades despite President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous warning about its rising power in his 1961 farewell address : “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Its power expanded exponentially after the September 11 attacks as counterterrorism and homeland security became big businesses, making it far more difficult for the United States to ever reduce its paranoia over the threat of terrorism.

But today’s combined military, intelligence, and counterterrorism complex is a capitalistic, pro-military center of gravity in American society. It is not anti-Trump or anti-conservative, and it is definitely not a secret political organization bent on imposing “woke” views on Americans.

In fact, it was the work of the Church Committee that helped ensure that the “deep state” is nothing more than a right-wing conspiracy theory today. In the first three decades after World War II, the U.S. intelligence community faced no real oversight or outside scrutiny, and as a result, the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA grew beyond presidents’ ability to control and became increasingly lawless. The reforms created as a result of the Church Committee helped to bring the intelligence community fully under the rule of law for the first time. By disclosing a series of shocking abuses of power, Frank Church and his committee created rules of the road for the intelligence community that largely remain in place today.

The Church Committee’s work represented a watershed moment in American history — which is why Republican are now so eager to co-opt its name. But there is no evidence that Jordan plans to follow the earlier panel’s serious and comprehensive approach. In fact, the involvement of Jordan and other House Republicans in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election already constitutes an obvious conflict of interest. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democrat who is now House minority leader, tweeted that “extreme MAGA Republicans have established a Select Committee on Insurrection Protection.”

Rather than being a true heir to the Church Committee, Jordan’s subcommittee seems destined to follow the pattern of the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Jordan and today’s Republicans are employing the same kind of resentment and grievances against “elites” that fueled Joseph McCarthy, and Jordan also seems destined to use some of McCarthy’s tactics, targeting individual officials to claim they are “woke” or part of the “deep state” — updated versions of McCarthy’s phraseology about “Communist subversion.” It’s no coincidence that Roy Cohn, who worked as chief counsel to McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings, later became a key mentor to Trump in the work of launching vicious political attacks.

Previously an obscure back-bench Republican senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy surged to fame in 1950, when he falsely claimed in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, to have a list of Communists in the State Department, triggering a period of intense paranoia and witch hunting that is now known as the McCarthy era. After he became a committee chair in 1953, McCarthy switched his focus to the Army, with Cohn by his side.

By going after the State Department and then the Army, McCarthy took on two of the most important and tradition-bound institutions in the United States at the time. The State Department had not fought back successfully against McCarthy, but the Army did. After McCarthy charged Army leaders with ignoring evidence of Communist subversion at a military facility in New Jersey, the Army went on the attack, accusing McCarthy of seeking special treatment for David Schine, a McCarthy consultant and friend of Cohn’s. The charges and counter-charges ultimately led to a long-running series of nationally televised hearings that garnered huge audiences, pitting McCarthy and Cohn against Joseph Welch, an urbane outside lawyer brought in to represent the Army.

In a televised hearing on June 9, 1954, McCarthy and Welch engaged in a historic showdown, with Cohn looking on. Bitter at Welch, McCarthy publicly raised questions about the loyalty of Fred Fisher, a lawyer at Welch’s law firm. Welch’s devastating response — “Have you no sense of decency?” — has gone down in history as the moment McCarthy’s power was broken.

In December 1954, the Senate finally voted to censure McCarthy; by 1957, he was dead.

Does the shame that finally brought down McCarthy still have the power to curb Republican excesses? Johnson, Frank Church’s former aide, isn’t so sure.

“We’re headed for something that combines a witch hunt with a circus,” Johnson said, noting that the so-called new Church Committee “is likely to make the 1950s McCarthy hearings appear, in retrospect, rather benign.”

The post Jim Jordan Is No Frank Church appeared first on The Intercept .

If politics were football, Donald Trump would be a JAG.

NFL fans know what that means: Trump is “Just a Guy.”

In professional football slang, being a JAG means that a player is average, nothing special. A JAG lacks game-changing talent and unique status. A JAG is not a star. If a JAG makes too many demands, he’ll be kicked off the team and thrown out on the street.

Trump is finally finding out that being a former president is not the same thing as being president. Both in the courts and in politics, it turns out that being a former president is a lot like being a JAG.

For four years, Trump used his special status as president to shield himself from criminal investigations and other legal actions. Trump’s position was clearly a factor in the decision by Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Trump-Russia case, not to bring charges against him. The nation’s main recourse for holding Trump accountable while he was president was impeachment, and he became the first president in history to be impeached twice by the House of Representatives. But the Republican-controlled Senate failed to convict him each time, and so Trump came to believe that he was bulletproof.

But now that he is out of office, Trump is finally fair game for an entire legion of lawyers. The legal system grinds slowly, but nearly two years after Trump left the White House, a dizzying number of cases against him are finally ramping up, seemingly all at once. Prosecutors are having a field day with Trump. He is facing a legal perfect storm.

Trump’s status as “just a guy” was confirmed Tuesday by a jury in New York, when his real estate company was convicted of tax fraud and other crimes. The jury found the Trump Organization guilty of all 17 counts of financial crimes the company was facing. Donald Trump was not personally charged in the case, but prosecutors did say during the trial that he was complicit by “explicitly sanctioning tax fraud.”

The criminal prosecution against Trump’s company came as he, his children, and their family business are also facing a civil case brought in September by the New York attorney general, charging them with fraud for radically overstating the value of company assets. If they are found guilty, Trump and his children could be barred from running businesses again in New York.

The New York criminal case against Trump’s company now appears to be leading to a renewed effort by local prosecutors to investigate Trump personally. After Tuesday’s verdict in the criminal case, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said that the case against Trump’s company was just “ one chapter in the book ,” and that his office’s investigation of Trump is still underway.

In fact, the verdict came as Bragg was also reportedly gearing up to revive a long-stalled criminal investigation into Trump’s secret hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. The money was designed to buy Daniels’s silence during the 2016 presidential campaign about her erstwhile affair with Trump.

Separately, E. Jean Carroll, a writer who claims Trump raped her in the mid-1990s , also sued the ex-president in late November for battery and defamation in New York. She had originally sued Trump for defamation while he was president, after he claimed he hadn’t assaulted her because she was “not my type.” That earlier lawsuit is still tied up in court over Trump’s claims that he can’t be sued for the comments because he was acting in his official capacity as president when he made them.

Similarly, a federal appeals court heard arguments Wednesday over whether Trump should be immune from lawsuits brought against him in connection with statements he made on January 6 . A district judge ruled against Trump in February, saying that the three lawsuits, brought by police officers who were at the Capitol on January 6 and Democratic members of Congress, could proceed despite Trump’s claims of presidential immunity for his speech.

Last week, the Supreme Court showed that it also now considers Trump a JAG. The court sided with the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee, ruling that the panel had the right to obtain Trump’s tax returns. The legal battle between Trump and the committee over his tax returns had gone on for years, beginning when he was president. But once he left office, he could no longer count on the support of the Justice and Treasury departments to shield his returns. Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., the New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Ways and Means subcommittee on oversight, noted that the Supreme Court ruling came after the panel had waited almost as long as it took to fight the Civil War.

On yet another front, an appeals court ruled in favor of the Justice Department and against Trump last week in the ongoing case involving his apparent theft of government documents . The appeals court overturned the decision by a lower court judge to create a so-called special master to review documents that the government took from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home during an FBI raid in August. The ruling clears the way for the newly appointed special counsel, Jack Smith , to finish the criminal investigation in the documents case. The legal maneuverings around the special master had slowed the case to a crawl over the last few months, but in its ruling, the appeals court made it clear that the lower-court judge had been wrong to give any special treatment to Trump in the way in which materials seized under a search warrant are handled.

Smith, the new special counsel, has also been put in charge of the criminal investigation of Trump’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and he has been busy on that front since taking over on November 18. Two of Trump’s White House lawyers were forced to testify last week before a federal grand jury about their former boss’s efforts to overturn the election; this week, meanwhile, Smith has sent grand jury subpoenas to officials in Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin, seeking any communications with Trump or his aides in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 vote. Smith seems to be intensifying the criminal probe of efforts by Trump and his allies to upend the results in key swing states so that he could win in the Electoral College.

While Smith ramps up his investigation, the House January 6 Committee, which will effectively go out of business when Republicans take over the House in January, plans to make criminal referrals to the Justice Department based on its investigation, the committee’s chair said Tuesday.

Separately, a Florida appeals court on Tuesday ordered Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser who later became a key figure in efforts to overturn the 2020 election , to testify as early as Thursday before a grand jury in Atlanta investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in Georgia. Flynn is expected to be one of the last witnesses before the Atlanta grand jury, which is a “special purpose” body and will not issue indictments; instead, it will recommend whether anyone should be prosecuted. The Georgia case, in which Trump may face charges of leading a conspiracy to send fake electors from Georgia to the Electoral College, may eventually pose a grave legal threat to the ex-president personally.

Another new verdict in a January 6-related case also is bad news for Trump. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right militia known as the Oath Keepers , was convicted last week of seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol insurrection. The verdict, showing that a jury believes there was a conspiracy behind the riot, raises the legal stakes for Trump and his lieutenants.

To once again try to shield himself from the legal tidal wave, Trump announced right after the midterm election in November that he was running for president again in 2024. But just as he no longer enjoys special legal status, his political power also seems to have ebbed. Almost all the major candidates Trump endorsed lost in the recent election, dragging Republicans down to one of the worst midterm performances in modern history for a party out of power. In a final insult on Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock defeated the Trump-anointed Republican, former football player Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff election. Failure in the midterms has finally led more Republicans to call for an end to the party’s addiction to Trump. (His rant last weekend demanding that the Constitution be suspended so he could be reinstalled as president apparently didn’t help.)

As the year ends with Trump’s JAG status confirmed, he can only console himself with right-wing dregs, like Elon Musk’s laughable efforts to publish Hunter Biden’s dick pics.

The post Donald Trump Is Out of Power — and Out of Luck appeared first on The Intercept .

Jack Smith came after me. If he goes after Donald Trump with the same unrelenting ferocity, Trump will be in trouble.

On Friday, Smith was appointed special counsel to handle two ongoing criminal investigations of Trump: the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the inquiry into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, including his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Attorney General Merrick Garland chose Smith to oversee both cases to avoid accusations of political bias, following Trump’s announcement last week that he plans to run for president in 2024. Trump’s early announcement was clearly an effort to insulate himself from criminal prosecution, and Garland’s countermove seems designed to frustrate the ex-president’s attempt to use the political system for his personal legal benefit.

Most recently a war crimes prosecutor at The Hague, Smith is a longtime federal prosecutor known for his aggressiveness . “I was described by Steve Bannon (and, sigh, many others) as a pit bull,” former Justice Department lawyer Andrew Weissmann, who worked on special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump and Russia, tweeted . “Jack Smith makes me look like a golden retriever puppy.”

Unfortunately, I have firsthand experience with Smith’s aggressiveness. He was part of the Justice Department team that turned my life upside down by trying, for seven years, to force me to reveal confidential sources that I’d used to report on a botched CIA operation.

The Justice Department first subpoenaed me in January 2008 to try to get me to reveal my sources and continued to target me until January 2015. The Justice Department kept coming at me, even though the federal judge in my case repeatedly ruled against them and sided with me. Each time the judge quashed one of their subpoenas, I thought I was finally done — but then the prosecutors would issue another one. It was excruciating.

Still, I refused to reveal my sources, and the Justice Department finally gave in. I won the battle in 2015, but only after the case went to the Supreme Court, and only after then-Attorney General Eric Holder ordered the prosecutors to back off because he was getting so much bad press for seeking to jail a reporter for refusing to disclose his confidential sources.

I know that the prosecution team was angered by Holder’s order to give up; they wanted to keep coming after me.

Smith was involved in the leak prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling , a former CIA officer, who was accused of being a source about the ill-fated CIA operation. Justice Department prosecutors have repeatedly targeted low-level officials, like former NSA contractor Reality Winner , in leak investigations and have sought draconian sentences against them. By contrast, they have shown extraordinary leniency toward high-ranking officials, like former CIA Director David Petraeus , caught up in similar investigations, many of whom have been let off with the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist.

With the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation, Smith must decide whether to prosecute Trump on the same kind of criminal charges that have been widely used in previous cases involving alleged leaks of classified information.

Will Jack Smith give Trump the kid-glove treatment that other high-ranking officials have so long enjoyed?

The question for Smith is whether he will seek heavy charges against Trump, like he and the Justice Department sought in the Sterling case and against many other low-level officials in the past. Or will he give Trump the kid-glove treatment that other high-ranking officials have so long enjoyed?

His decision on the Mar-a-Lago case will show whether Smith really is an aggressive prosecutor — or just aggressive against the powerless.

Of course, Smith could decide not to prosecute Trump in the documents case because he has come to believe that the laws governing the handling of classified information are too strict, and that no one, including low-ranking whistleblowers, should face serious penalties in such cases. But such a massive change of heart by a career prosecutor is highly unlikely.

Smith will have a major advantage over Robert Mueller , the special counsel in the long-running Trump-Russia case, in that he is stepping into investigations that are already well underway and staffed with teams of career Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents. It should be much easier for him to quickly make decisions than it was for Mueller.

The documents case is a straightforward matter involving the theft and mishandling of classified documents, as well as efforts to obstruct the federal investigation into their disappearance. The evidence appears conclusive that Trump illegally stole classified documents after his presidency, and then tried to block the investigation into the documents by hiding them, lying about them, and getting others to lie on his behalf as well.

The biggest obstacle to a quick resolution of the documents case is Trump’s ongoing campaign to claim that he has a special legal status as a former president that precludes his prosecution in the case. He and his lawyers have, at various times, claimed both executive privilege and attorney-client privilege to try to block the government’s access to documents seized at Mar-a-Lago during a court-authorized FBI raid in August. He has also said that he owns the documents outright, and that he has the right to keep documents from his time as president.

But while Trump has won some favorable rulings from a federal district judge he appointed, prosecutors have already been able to reverse some of the lower court’s rulings. On Tuesday, prosecutors sought a ruling from a federal appeals court that would end the role of a “special master” appointed by the district judge to review documents in the case. Thus it may not be long before the legal maneuverings sputter out, and Smith will have to make a decision on whether to prosecute.

The case involving Trump’s efforts to illegally overturn the 2020 election, culminating with the January 6 insurrection, is more complex than the documents case — yet it is still far less complicated than the Trump-Russia investigation.

The Trump-Russia case was about whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win — and whether Trump or anyone in his circle collaborated with Moscow in its meddling. Trump’s efforts to obstruct the investigation also became a major focus for Mueller. But such a sprawling probe, involving a foreign country, was too much for Mueller; he never moved aggressively to get information out of Russia. Ultimately, he pulled his punches, and was unwilling to indict a sitting president.

By contrast, Smith won’t have to get information out of a foreign adversary to prove his case in connection with the 2020 election — and he won’t have to worry about indicting a president who is still in office.

The main question for Smith in the case will be how to narrow the investigation’s focus to bring an indictment of Trump under one or more specific criminal laws. Until now, prosecutors have focused on the role Trump and others played in arranging to have fake presidential electors put forward from key states, thus overturning Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College.

But Smith could broaden the investigation to include Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection. Already, the Justice Department has brought seditious conspiracy cases against right-wing militia leaders involved in the insurrection; jury deliberations have begun in the sedition case against Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and four others.

If he is truly aggressive, Smith could seek similar charges against Donald Trump.

The post I Experienced Jack Smith’s Zeal Firsthand. Will Trump Get the Same Treatment? appeared first on The Intercept .