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The Jack Smith Operation Shows Lawfare Will Only Get Worse

Conservatives have yet to build the institutions, infrastructure, and legal capacity needed to counter lawfare before it destroys more lives.

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Lawfare grows more dangerous with every operation. This week’s disclosures about Jack Smith’s operation show how far that machinery reached.

We already knew about Smith’s sweeping indictments of President Trump on flimsy charges and many of the operation’s other abuses, including the secret seizure of phone records from Republican lawmakers, the review of text messages involving 44 members of Congress, and subpoenas seeking records on at least 430 Republican individuals and entities. This week, we also found out that Smith’s team of lawfare operators spied on nearly 50 journalists, including Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist.

They seized copies of 4,782 checks written by Americans who donated to Trump and Republican groups, exposing donors’ names, home addresses, bank and routing numbers, and signatures. These were ordinary Americans dragged into the lawfare simply because they wrote a check to support a political candidate. Smith also swept up records of people who had run pro-Trump ads. The sheer extent of the intrusions and abuses is incredible. 

We can get furious about each round of revelations, with every new disclosure producing another round of outrage. But the real lesson, and the far more frightening reality we have to grapple with, is that lawfare keeps getting more sophisticated and more vicious.

In many ways, this progression began in crude form in 2004, when 60 Minutes aired a false story about President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. The broadcast relied on documents claiming Bush had received favorable treatment and failed to meet his obligations. Lawyer Harry MacDougald, a through-line in fighting lawfare over the years, exposed those documents as forgeries. Dan Rather, who ran the story, was ultimately forced to resign.

Perhaps........

© The Federalist