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Trump Fires Back After Biden’s DOJ Appoints Special Counsel

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


Donald Trump has responded after U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Friday that he was appointing a special counsel to take over criminal investigations into the former president.

“Here we go again! I thought that the Unselect Committee on January 6th was a dead issue, especially with the record setting loss off [sic] Liz Chaney in the Great State of Wyoming, and likewise felt that the document hoax case, after reviewing the Clinton Socks Case & the Presidential Record Act, was dead, or at least dying fast,” Trump noted on his Truth Social platform.

“The Democrat Department of ‘Justice’ had nothing, except Trump haters, so they just appointed a Special Prosecutor to go after me further. Disgraceful!” he added.

On Friday, Garland named former federal prosecutor Jack Smith, who worked in the Justice Department during the Obama administration, to be special counsel, The Wall Street Journal reported. Since 2018, Smith has worked at The Hague investigating war crimes. He is the third special counsel in five years to look into issues involving Trump, which has led to cries of political partisanship, especially since Trump declared his intention to run for the GOP presidential nomination once again on Tuesday.

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“Based on recent developments, including the former president’s announcement that he’s a candidate for president in the next election, and the sitting president’s stated intention to be a candidate as well, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a special counsel,” Garland said in remarks on Friday at the Justice Department. “This appointment will not slow the completion of these investigations.”

Mike Davis, a former chief counsel for nominations for then-Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and who is now president of the Article III Project, blasted the appointment as political, noting that President Joe Biden’s Justice Department remains laser-focused on Trump while refusing to move against credible allegations involving him and his son, Hunter Biden.

“By appointing a special counsel to investigate his boss’s top political enemy, Attorney General Merrick Garland continues to politicize and weaponize the Biden Justice Department, all while ignoring smoking-gun evidence of the Biden family’s foreign corruption,” he said in a statement.

“Garland announced he’s essentially giving his special counsel whatever he needs to investigate the non-crimes of objecting to a presidential election (like Democrats did in 1967, 2001, 2005, and 2017) and keeping personal copies of presidential records (like Clinton did with highly classified tapes hidden in his sock drawer), both expressly permitted by federal statutes,” he continued.

“The blatant political bias within the Biden Justice Department erodes trust from the American people that justice is fairly applied to everyone, regardless of their political affiliation,” Davis noted further.

“Like with the politically-motivated and baseless Mueller probe, Garland knows a special counsel will unnecessarily drag on and leave a dark political cloud over Trump while he’s running for president over the next two years. Garland’s third-world election interference will no doubt make his boss happy. Indeed, Biden knows he can’t beat Trump, so he’ll simply indict him,” he added.

As for Smith, others on social media claimed he was chosen by Garland because he is well-known within Democratic circles.

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“Jack Smith is well known and liked in leftist circles because of his role in the IRS scandal, working with Lois Lerner to illicitly target conservative groups,” the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Howell tweeted.

“Jack Smith also refused to comply with a congressional subpoena… Why should Trump comply with his?” he added in a separate tweet containing a link to a May 2014 Government Executive story.

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“In 2010, Obama AG Eric Holder picked Jack Smith to run Public Integrity Section. Smith took out VA Gov. Bob McDonnell as a potential GOP presidential candidate–on bogus corruption charges,” Smith added in another post. “Supreme Court reversed, 9-0. Now Smith is back–to take out @realDonaldTrump.”

After the appointment, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that Biden had no prior knowledge of Smith’s appointment.

“The Department of Justice makes decisions about its criminal investigations independently,” she claimed.

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