'Pumping up the outrage': Ex-prosecutor slams Jack Smith for taking Trump's bait
Special counsel Jack Smith keeps getting prodded into making "foolish" decisions by Donald Trump's legal team, a former federal prosecutor argued Monday.
Bill Shipley, a former prosecutor who has represented dozens of Jan. 6 defendants, wrote on his "Shipwrecked Crew" blog that Smith kept taking bail set out by Trump attorneys to allow the former president's defenders to spin a media narrative about the Mar-a-Lago documents case, reported Newsweek.
"Some efforts being made by the Trump legal team as part of its defense to the indictment in federal court in Florida are far more significant as part of a political strategy than they are as part of the legal defense strategy," Shipley wrote. "The Trump defense team knows this even if some of FPOTUS Trump’s most ardent defenders in the press can’t seem to tell the difference."
"More importantly, however, it seems that SC Smith can’t tell the difference as he continues to be put in a position to step on a rake — and then he does exactly that," he added.
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Shipley said the former president's lawyers were "pumping up the outrage meter" over the Aug. 8, 2022, search for classified materials at Mar-a-Lago, and Trump and his allies then spun a narrative out of the FBI's standardized declaration about the use of deadly force.
"Trump’s [New York criminal] trial was still underway when this reporting hit social media, with conservative commentators, so-called 'journalists,' and elected officials all spinning out the narrative that the 'authorization to use deadly force' against Trump, his family, and the Secret Service if they resisted — was in reality an 'assassination plan,'" Shipley wrote.
He argues Smith could have ignored that media sideshow but instead took the bait and filed a motion seeking to modify Trump's conditions for pretrial release and impose a gag order limiting his claims about FBI conduct, which handed the ex-president a political win.
"This is the 'Briar Patch' that Trump’s Defense was happy to have been thrown into by SC Smith’s motion because it provides an opportunity for a different political narrative that can be hammered home by the campaign arising out of the legal arena, i.e., Trump’s First Amendment rights were being taken away," Shipley wrote.
That then allowed Trump to claim that Smith was doing the bidding of president Joe Biden, the former prosecutor said.
"Smith meet garden rake — garden rake, meet Smith," Shipley wrote.