So far, Jack Smith, a/k/a Jack the Knife, has twice indicted Donald Trump.  The first indictment is for classified documents at Mar a Lago.  The second indictment alleges that Trump somehow defrauded the government by believing that he won the 2020 election and saying so.  Mr. Smith was appointed the special prosecutor by AG Merrick Garland because he is uniquely qualified for the job.  Smith was the head of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section under Il Duce Obama, where he proved himself to be willing and able to stretch any statute, bend any rule, and ignore or circumvent any constitutional protection to prosecute a politician.  Smith’s proclivity for conducting himself like a rabid dog, rather than as an ethical prosecutor, has gotten him into some trouble over the years.  Smith’s victories in trial courts have sometimes failed to stand up on appeal.  Smith’s prosecution of former Virginia Governor McDonnell and his wife, supposedly for bribery over their acceptance of gifts is a case in point.  There was a conviction in the trial court, but the U.S. Supreme court reversed it 8-0.  In so doing, the Court observed “there is no doubt that this case is distasteful; it may be worse than that.  But our concern is not with tawdry tales of Ferraris, Rolexes, and ball gowns.  It is instead with the broader legal implications of the Government’s boundless interpretation of the federal bribery statute.”  The High Court rebuked Smith and warned that “the uncontrolled power of criminal prosecutors is a threat to our separation of powers.” In the end, the McDonnell’s were vindicated, but only after spending $27 million to defend themselves.  Smith unsuccessfully prosecuted former presidential candidate John Edwards for campaign finance violations.  When Senator Bob Menendez crossed Il Duce Obama, it was Smith who unsuccessfully prosecuted Menendez for bribery.  Smith has shown that he has no respect for the concept of attorney-client privilege, being in the habit of piercing the privilege to use attorney-client communications to prosecute defendants.  A Federal District Judge ruled that Smith illegally wiretapped calls between  a former Arizona Congressman he was prosecuting and his attorney.  Smith also used attorney-client communications to obtain the Trump indictments.  Jack the Knife conducts himself more like a racketeer than a prosecutor, by using blatant intimidation techniques in his prosecutions.  In the McDonnell case, he tried to coerce a plea from Bob McDonnell by threatening to indict Mrs. McDonnell if he refused.  He refused, and the wife was indicted.  In the Arizona case, Smith and his team obtained testimony from a cooperating witness by promising the witness $25,000 which they never paid.  In the Trump documents case, an attorney for codefendant Nauta, claims a prosecutor on Mr. Smith’s team threatened that the attorney’s application for a judgeship would be considered more favorably if he and his client turned against Mr. Trump.  The attorney has filed a complaint with the chief U.S. judge in Washington alleging prosecutorial misconduct.  Smith also has repeatedly tried to gag defendants while himself leaking to the media.  Just to keep the tallies straight, as this is written, there are three indictments against Donald Trump, including some 78 criminal counts, which carry aggregate penalties of about 641 years.  The Manhattan case is a joke, turning a legal payment for a non-disclosure agreement into a felony bookkeeping charge, all of which occurred more than five years ago, beyond the statute of limitations.  Whether this prosecution can go forward at all depends on the interpretation of an obscure provision of New York law, which permits extension of the limitation when “the defendant has been out of the State” the entire time.  This provision was intended to permit the prosecution of fugitives beyond the reach of the New York courts.  The argument will have to be that as president, Trump was “out of the State.”  That’s ridiculous, and I expect that the NY Court of Appeals will need to rule on this before any trial can begin.  The documents case, venued in Florida, has more merit, but just a little.  The dispute was between Trump and the National Archives, which has custody over classified documents.  But the law giving custody to the Archives carries no criminal penalty, so Smith had to stretch it into a conspiracy.  The problem with this is that the Presidential Records Act permits former presidents to keep some records, and Smith’s indictment isn’t clear about which particular documents were mishandled.  In a nutshell, this is an indictment that would only be brought against Donald Trump, whom the Establishment has never considered to be a legitimate President of the United States.  There seems to be a Trump exception to every legal protection afforded to criminal defendants in general and former presidents in particular.  Case in point, Trump stored documents for two years in a locked room approved of by the FBI and got indicted.  Corrupt Demented Imbecile Joe Biden, possessed classified documents dating to 1979.  He had no right to keep any classified documents.  He stored them in open boxes in his Delaware garage, and in the Penn-Biden Center at UPenn, where they were available to the Chinese nationals who bought and paid for the UPenn boondoggle, that paid Biden $900,000 to do nothing.  He has not, and will not be charged with any offense.  The latest, so-called January 6th indictment is just more Jack Smith sleight of hand.  All the charges involve the allegation that Trump knew he lost the 2020 election, but lied about it to try to change its result.  Once again, fanciful conspiracies are alleged.  What really happened was that Trump was seeking to have Congressmen and Vice President Pence challenge the election results in several States to permit State Legislatures to evaluate the electoral processes used, and which the Constitution states is the province of the Legislatures.  Democrats have challenged every election they’ve lost since 2000.  Smith turned it into this:  A conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government; A conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified; and A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.  That last one is a statute enacted after the Civil War to stop the KKK from keeping black voters from casting votes.  Its application to the Trump case is, to say the least, puzzling, and brings to mind the words of the Supreme Court in the McDonnell case, “the uncontrolled power of criminal prosecutors is a threat to our separation of powers.”  Trump relied on legal experts who found fraud and he said so.  Other lawyers disagreed.  Jack Smith has decided which legal opinions were correct, and now seeks to punish Trump for exercising his First Amendment rights.  It’s ironic that Democrats, who have spent so much time blaming Vladimir Putin for Trump’s victory, have adopted Putin’s tactics for dealing with political opponents, who he regularly throws into prison.  I wish I believed Trump could win in 2024, just to be able to see their heads explode.