OPINION:
It is now against the law for a politician to tell a lie, according to the Department of Justice’s highly enthusiastic prosecutor Jack Smith.
What on earth will anyone in Washington ever talk about again? Cable news channels will go dark. Rep. Adam Schiff’s voice box will be surgically removed.
Congress will be turned into a hushed monastery, with only the squeak of an occasional mouse scurrying across the waxed marble floors to be heard.
All the expensive restaurants lining Pennsylvania Avenue that keep all the fat-cat lobbyists at the trough and well fattened will be shuttered. Rep. Jerrold Nadler will become a swimsuit model.
The sirens of so many motorcades every day will be silenced and give way to the summer cicadas and bullfrogs along the Potomac River.
Never again will you hear the ominous tones of another political attack ad droning on your TV at home. Our last election is behind us.
Politics has been outlawed.
Actually, that sounds kind of nice. The only problem is that it’s a fantasy world. And the Founders kind of covered all this when they wrote the Constitution.
Lying is bad. It is terrible. It is awful.
People should not lie, especially people in powerful positions.
OK, but who should decide what is a lie? And more important, who should decide who is lying?
God? A king? Congress? The Supreme Court? The media? A rogue federal prosecutor with an impressive record of failure going after politicians?
No. The only people qualified and empowered to determine who is lying and who should lead are the voters.
And the only way for voters to decide those questions is through elections.
The insane indictment returned this week is not against former President Donald Trump. It is an indictment against elections, and more specifically, free speech.
It’s an indictment of the political process.
Most important, it is an attempt to hijack the electoral system so that voters cannot choose the next president. Indeed, the Biden administration seeks to jail its top political rival rather than face him in the next election.
In the indictment, special counsel Jack Smith accuses Mr. Trump of “dishonesty, fraud and deceit” — even “prolific lies” — in his political speeches after the 2020 election, questioning the fairness of that election.
“These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” according to Mr. Smith.
So, not only has Mr. Smith decided that it is now against the law for a politician to lie, he has also discovered the perfect person to decide that which is a lie and that which is true: himself.
And if that galloping self-regard were not staggering enough, Mr. Smith has also crowned himself the final arbiter of exactly what Mr. Trump was thinking and when he thought those thoughts.
So, “the Defendant knew that they were false.” Really? Based on Mr. Trump’s private comments to former Vice President Mike Pence? But I thought you said Mr. Trump was a liar!
When was he lying, and when was he telling the truth, Mr. Smith?
It takes your breath away to behold such arrogance, especially when it’s entwined with such profound ignorance.
That Mr. Smith is prosecuting Mr. Trump for free speech pertaining to an election is particularly rich. If free speech is not protected when it pertains to an election, then why the hell do we have free speech in the first place? So that we can yell freely during a soccer game?
Even if this new standard for jailable speech were to apply only to politicians who question the results of elections, then Mr. Smith and the Biden Gestapo will be busy indeed. The jails will overflow with Democratic politicians in particular.
That’s because in the decades preceding Mr. Trump, Republican politicians mastered the art of being polite, obedient losers.
The truth is that this prosecution — like all the rest against Mr. Trump — is about nothing more than jailing Donald Trump to prevent voters from reelecting him to the White House in a free and fair election.
There is a term for this. It’s called “election interference.” And it’s worse than a lie.
Jack Smith and the rest of President Biden’s political henchmen at DOJ should be held accountable for it.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times.
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