Most journalists insist there is nothing partisan about Jack Smith's indictments of Donald Trump. They keep repeating that Smith is acting independently as Special Counsel and is uninfluenced by political concerns despite his apparent urgency to have his trials concluded before the 2024 general election.
But in New York magazine, liberal lawyer Ankush Khadori is celebrating the political warfare waged by Nancy Pelosi in a piece headlined: "The Pelosi Factor: Trump’s longtime antagonist played an essential role in his historic indictment." It's their Most Viewed story right now.
Khardori does not once even mention the name of Jack Smith and gives most of the credit (the "essential role") for the J6 indictment of Trump to the overtly political Pelosi.
...you cannot tell the story of Trump’s historic indictment without Nancy Pelosi. It was the then-Speaker of the House who insisted that there be a congressional inquiry following January 6. And it was the work of the select committee she fashioned that finally appears to have spurred a reluctant Justice Department to action, setting in motion a more intense phase of criminal scrutiny focused on Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The resulting indictment closely tracks the select committee’s work and findings, presenting a factual narrative that traces — almost identically — the evidence presented by the committee of a sophisticated, multipronged effort by Trump to remain in power that culminated in the mayhem at the U.S. Capitol.
In early 2021, Khardori worried in Politico that Pelosi creating a January 6 Commission wouldn't be enough -- Trump had to be prosecuted. But it evolved into a congressional inquiry that acted as an unofficial criminal investigation.
Khardori asked Pelosi whether "she had ever tried to speak with Attorney General Merrick Garland, President Biden, or anyone in the White House about making sure the Justice Department was properly investigating Trump’s conduct." She claimed she did not, but House Democrats were nervous about the administration somehow going soft on Trump.
Pelosi wanted to avoid the image of Smith just picking up the committee's work product and running with it. Oh no, the Smith indictments are so superior to the House committee efforts!
I asked Pelosi how she thought this would all end, and she struck a tentative but cautiously optimistic tone. “As we always say, it all depends on what happens at the end of the day, but you have to determine what the end of the day is. Yesterday was the end of a day. The former president of the United States was arraigned, and that was a triumph for the truth.”
“The indictments against the president are exquisite,” Pelosi added, referring to both the latest set of charges and the earlier federal indictment over Trump’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and his subsequent efforts to obstruct investigators. “They’re beautiful and intricate, and they probably have a better chance of conviction than anything that I would come up with.”
Thank you New York Magazine for reminding us how completely political those "exquisite" and "beautiful" indictments of Trump are by favorably citing perhaps his greatest enemy in Congress as the mastermind behind them.
