WASHINGTON – In response to questioning from Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) this morning, Deputy Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche confirmed Jack Smith withheld relevant impeachment records from defense counsel during one of his criminal cases against President Trump – including records Grassley recently released proving the Smith elector case was generated by an anti-Trump FBI agent acting in violation of FBI protocol. Withholding impeachment evidence from defense counsel prevents the defendant from raising a complete defense and performing full and complete questioning of witnesses.
Chairman Grassley issued the following comment regarding this revelation:
“Jack Smith and his merry band of DOJ partisans weaponized the justice system to put President Trump and his defense team at an unfair disadvantage. It’s no surprise Smith didn’t play by the rules. After all, Smith’s cases against Trump were never about fairness – they were always about vengeance and aimed at destroying a political opponent. The American people defeated Smith’s lawfare when they elected Donald Trump on November 5. Moving forward, the Department of Justice will be far better off with Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche at its helm, who will follow the law and hold bad actors accountable.”
Watch video of Grassley’s exchange with Blanche HERE. A transcript is below.
GRASSLEY: Mr. Blanche, Senator Johnson and I recently released FBI emails and other records to the public regarding Arctic Frost, the FBI’s case against Trump. Those records show that anti-Trump FBI agent Thibault drafted, opened, and advanced the information that became the basis of Jack Smith’s elector case. The records further show the work was done in violation of FBI rules. The government is supposed to produce impeachment evidence to defense counsel.
Did the government produce emails and records between Thibault and his team of agents to defense counsel, including the ones I recently made public?
BLANCHE: No, Senator.
GRASSLEY: You represented President Trump against both of Jack Smith’s lawfare cases. During the course of those cases, defense counsel raised issues involving DOJ and prosecutorial misconduct. Beyond that which is public already, are you able to share with this committee additional examples of alleged Justice Department misconduct?
BLANCHE: Thank you, Chairman. Yes, for sure. Two things come to mind.
The first – and a lot of this actually is public if you look very long and hard, it’s just never reported. The first is, when President Trump was indicted in Florida first, the prosecutors in that case initially asked the court to not allow President Trump, the defendant in that case, to see the documents that he was charged with. Okay? To see the evidence against him. The initial submission said they didn’t think that the former President of the United States had a right to see the evidence against him. That’s something that even terrorists who are charged often get to see, at least to some extent.
Secondly, three months later, when President Trump was indicted in D.C., the prosecutors in that case asked the judge to start a trial December 11th of the same year, not withstanding the fact that Jack Smith knew that he was producing over 11 terabytes of discovery to President Trump and the defendants. He also knew that President Trump was going to be on a trial in New York – a civil trial brought by the AG in New York – for much of the fall, and that he already had a trial scheduled in Manhattan to start in the early spring. He also knew that Judge Cannon had already scheduled an evidentiary hearing the same day in Florida that they wanted the trial to start in D.C. Not withstanding all that, that was their position, and Chairman, the frustration – if I’m frustrated, I continue to be frustrated – is that the Department of Justice knew that that was happening – nobody stopped it. Nobody stepped in and said, ‘Hey that’s not the way we do things at the Department of Justice.’ They just let Jack Smith do it.
There are other examples. When the Supreme Court decided the immunity decision on July 1st, Jack Smith went right back to the grand jury, removed almost nothing from the indictment, and filed another charge. The Department of Justice stood by and let that happen. That, I think, was a gross miscarriage of justice, Chairman.
Later on, in September, once again, they filed a brief that has never been filed in any case in United States criminal Department of Justice history. They just filed something. There was no motion pending, they knew it was a month and a half before the election, and they filed a 170-something page brief that had no basis in the federal rules of criminal procedure. Apparently, they got permission or clearance from the Department of Justice to do that.
So those are the two examples that always come to mind when asked about what happened, and to this day I think that that was a travesty of justice.
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