CNN’s Deep State Tool: Smith Spying on Conservative Orgs ‘Routine’ for ‘Building a Case’

An hour into Tuesday’s bombshell Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with former Special Counsel Jack Smith, CNN’s senior Justice correspondent Evan Perez defended Smith’s surveillance of conservative organizations through subpoenas and seizures of electronic communications — which Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) revealed included this organization, the Media Research Center— as not anything close to “weaponization” but merely “a routine part of building a case if you’re doing a criminal case.”

Perez — who was friends with the firm Fusion GPS that peddled the Steele dossier  — was cued up by Situation Room co-host Wolf Blitzer admitting Smith had “secured two — yes, two federal criminal indictments against President Trump under the Biden Justice Department.”

Blitzer further fretted: “Smith has long drawn the fury of President Trump and his allies, who say those investigations were politically motivated.”

Asked to explain what he thought would unfold, Perez huffed that viewers would “hear a lot from Republicans who are trying to paint the investigations that Jack Smith oversaw as politicized, as — as weaponization against Republicans, against the president of the United States.”

Perez then laid the predicate for going after conservative groups:

Of course, at the time, he was former president when Jack Smith was investigating him. And what you hear there, what you heard there from — from — from Smith is him backing up everything that happened in that investigation, that everything he believes that was done — was done not for political purposes, as the President and some of his Republican allies in this room want to point out, want to make it out to be, that what he was doing was following the law and trying to bring a case.

As though it was a burden for him to have to talk about it, Perez lamented, “there is going to be a lot of focus already, is a lot of focus on phone records belonging to members of Congress, bank records belonging to conservative organizations that were subpoenaed as part of this investigation.”

Perez then asserted there’s nothing to see there, or raise concern about government overreach:

[W]e know that that’s a routine part of building a case if you’re doing a criminal case, you — you subpoena those records as part of an effort to — to make that case. Republicans say that they should never have that — should never have happened because that was politicization. And so, that’s what a lot of the focus that we’re going to hear about the questioning — the questioning of Jack Smith over the next several hours.

Amid the latest seemingly gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Lindsey Clancy case, Blitzer and Perez returned to the Smith hearing in the 11:00 a.m. Eastern hour. Blitzer fawned over Smith as having “delivered a very defiant message directly to his critics on that Senate Judiciary Committee” as the GOP insisted “he acted politically and should be prosecuted himself.”

Blitzer further portrayed Republicans as unserious (and thus his friends in the Democrat Party as serious): “Very dramatic stuff, Evan. Republicans have been aggressive in their questioning so far, right?”

Perez again went along with this, dismissing the GOP’s questioning as exclusively performative and to “refram[e] the events of January 6”:

That’s right, Wolf. They are very aggressive in the questioning. But I will say, you know, in between the time that they’re not — when the Republicans are not speaking, a lot of them have left the room, and it gives you a sense of what the purpose of this hearing is. This is not so much about getting information from Jack Smith. It’s about reframing the events of January 6 and those investigations that Jack Smith oversaw, and part of that, the job of some of the members of Congress, some of these senators, is to frame some of the actions by the investigators as targeting Republicans.

This cued up a Smith exchange with Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) that Perez provided little context to, thus purposefully making Kennedy’s trademark quips seem inappropriate (click “expand”):

PEREZ: Listen to this exchange between Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana and Jack Smith about some of the actions taken during this investigation.

KENNEDY: You saw just the records of the Republicans, and you knew that violated the speech and debate clause, didn’t you?

SMITH: That is incorrect. We sought to comply with —

KENNEDY: Did you take ConLaw?

SMITH: — I’m sorry, Senator?

KENNEDY: Were you in the quad playing Frisbee during the ConLaw at Harvard Law School?

SMITH: I did take constitutional law, yes.

KENNEDY: Well, then you had to know it violated the Speech and Debate Clause. In fact, when you went to Judge Boasberg, you didn’t even tell him you were seeking the phone records of members of Congress, did you? Because you knew he wouldn’t agree. He would. He would say, hey, counsel, anybody who knows a law book from a J.Crew catalog knows that this violates the Constitution. But you didn’t tell him, did you?

SMITH: We sought non-disclosure orders from —

KENNEDY: You didn’t tell him, did you?

SMITH: — in seeking non-disclosure orders, we did not.

KENNEDY: Didn’t tell him. But you’re unbiased. You have no personal feelings. You make me want to throw up in my mouth.

PEREZ: And, Wolf, you know, that’s that gives you a little bit of the flavor of what’s going on in the room behind me. Look, I mean, the — the investigation that they’re talking about, of course, is about the President — the then-President of the United States, Donald Trump, trying to avoid, you know, the — the — the certification of his losing that election. And, of course, the part of the investigation was looking into whether there were people like Rudy Giuliani calling members of Congress, Republicans who would have been working with them to try to do that. And so, of course, it would be Republican members of Congress whose phone records, the toll records that would have been would have been subpoenaed. Democrats were not involved in that. And of course, that gives you a sense of this investigation.

To see the relevant CNN transcript from September 29, click here.