How the DOJ Outsourced Trump’s Indictment to House Dems

By Daniel Greenfield August 20, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

 When former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saw the indictment of Trump, she observed that, “it’s interesting to see how similar they are to some of the charges recommended by the January 6 committee and I commend, again, the committee.”

Soumya Dayananda, a senior investigator for the House Democrat committee claimed that, “the committee’s work provided this path.”

A New York Times article described the indictment as having a “narrative that was nearly identical”.

The Democrat prosecutor’s team admitted its dependence on the Democrat congressional committee by citing its work in its demand that the former president’s trial take place in early January 2024 so that it can overshadow the election and any potential inauguration.

The document filed by the Smith team claimed that it would produce materials to the Trump team including “unredacted materials obtained from other governmental entities, including the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol”. The filing also argued for the relevance of the “report written by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.”

Smith’s team was arguing that much of the evidence that it would introduce at trial had already been produced and made public by the House Democrat J6 committee. Trump’s team would receive the unredacted version of the materials and could then expect to be ready for trial.

It was a more official admission that the J6 indictment was just the J6 committee operating within the Justice Department and empowered to abuse the law by bringing criminal charges.

The media had described the House Democrat J6 criminal referrals as “historic.” They are historic in the sense that no partisan congressional committee had ever arranged to conduct a criminal trial of an opposing presidential candidate before.

That’s history of the banana republic kind.

The Democrat committee had issued four criminal referrals Three of the four charges in the indictment were adopted verbatim from the Democrat committee’s criminal referral. Smith swapped out the entirely unsupportable ‘insurrection’ charge for an anti-Klan law which among other things bans wearing costumes on highways.

All of this violates what Attorney Merrick Garland, who handpicked Smith to go after Trump, had promised. During his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings, Garland had assured his audience that no “politics would have any influence over prosecutions or investigations.”

“The president has promised that those decisions will only be made by the attorney general, and that is what I plan to do. I do not plan to be interfered with by anyone. I expect the Justice Department will make its own decisions in this regard,” he told senators.

“I want to make clear to the career prosecutors…that my job is to protect them from partisan or other improper motives,”

By the time the J6 committee circus was on their way, Garland was telling a different story. “I am watching, and I will be watching all the hearings, although I may not be able to watch all of it live,” he promised Democrats. “And I can assure you that the Jan. 6 prosecutors are watching all the hearings.”

“The Jan. 6 Committee Returns With One Viewer in Mind: Merrick Garland,” Time Magazine headlined its coverage.

AG Garland and his boys and girls were doing more than watching. The Justice Department contacted the House J6 lead investigator to let him know that his work “may contain information relevant to a criminal investigation we are conducting” and asked for transcripts.

Despite that the Justice Department kept claiming that these were separate investigations. It is now undeniable that the DOJ J6 investigation piggybacked on the work of the House Democrat J6 committee, and that Garland lied when he claimed that there would be no political influence.

The investigation had been as political as it could possibly be because it was undertaken by Democrat opponents of the former president in order to prevent him from running again.

Despite Garland’s promise to “pursue justice without fear or favor”, he provided a rubber stamp for a partisan effort by his boss and his congressional allies to go after an opposing candidate.

Smith’s reliance on the work of the J6 Democrats also raises serious questions about his claim that the Justice Department was conducting “the most wide-ranging investigation in its history”. If the DOJ was conducting a more wide-ranging investigation than say after the attacks of 9/11, why does it appear like such a carbon copy of the work of House Democrats? Why is Smith’s team citing the J6 committee’s materials as representing much of the evidence for the trial?

The House Democrats on the J6 committee had far more unlimited purse strings, blowing through millions of dollars in its investigations, hiring outside investigators and benefiting from a large staff. The “most wide-ranging investigation in its history” wasn’t conducted by the DOJ or Jack Smith, but by the House Democrats who spent lavishly on their political lynch mob.

The 57 staffers and the millions in spending meant that House Democrats and their paid personnel and outside investigators did the real work that Smith had dropped in his lap. This was nearly the same arrangement as Russiagate, where work done by Hillary Clinton’s campaign was then deposited in the Justice Department and the FBI for a rubber stamp.

The Justice Department followed the same protocol in both Russiagate and J6: taking an outside Democrat political hit job and pretending to go through the process of validating it. The actual purpose of both Russiagate and the J6 indictment is the same: to rig an election.

Attorney General Merrick Garland lied when he promised an apolitical justice department. Instead he set out to replicate the abuses that the Obama administration had perpetrated with Russiagate on a much larger scale.

The Trump indictment is not the work of an apolitical DOJ, but of a Democrat committee. It’s not there to provide justice, but to define the election around a Democrat criminal proceeding.

The only real difference between Russiagate and the J6 trial is that the former failed to launch. Garland, Smith and their political backers and bosses intend to make sure this one sticks.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.