One can debate which of the four indictments against Donald Trump is the biggest threat to his freedom, not to mention his shameless campaign to reclaim the White House.
We’d rank them this way, from least to most threatening:
4. New York indictment that Trump, while running for the presidency in 2016, tried to cover up hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, with whom he allegedly had had an affair.
3. Atlanta indictment that Trump and 18 political allies conspired in an election fraud designed to reverse Joe Biden’s narrow victory in Georgia in the 2020 election.
2. Federal indictment in Florida that Trump willfully absconded with classified documents when he grudgingly left office, and then conspired to try to hide them from investigators and his own lawyers.
1. Federal indictment in Washington, D.C., that Trump tried to stop the official certification of Biden’s victory and incited the riot that led to the storming of the Capitol.
The New York and Atlanta cases have been assailed by the Republican former president and his supporters as blatantly partisan attacks by two Democratic district attorneys looking to make a national name for themselves. That will continue to be the line of argument through the ultimate resolution of both state prosecutions.
No such case, though, can be credibly made against the lead prosecutor in the two federal indictments, Jack Smith.
Smith was appointed by the U.S. Justice Department to investigate these cases as a special counsel. The appointment insulated him from politics and the Biden Justice Department from the accusation that it was steering the investigation.
Smith and his team, although they reported to the Justice Department about their findings before going public with them, worked largely outside of the federal agency’s oversight. As a result, the special counsel’s conclusions carry considerable weight.
The Fulton County, Georgia, investigation, while interesting in its large haul of Trump allies, is just a subset of what the former president and his duplicitous camp allegedly tried to accomplish around the country and, as a last-ditch effort, at the national seat of power itself. Smith, as did a congressional panel before him, concluded that Trump orchestrated an unsuccessful effort to overturn an election result that numerous courts had told him was legitimate and that he himself knew to be so.
If any of the dozen charges are going to stick, those leveled by Smith have the greatest chance.
