Politically speaking, I don’t blame former president Donald Trump and his supporters for framing as “Election Interference” the superseding indictment that Biden-Harris DOJ special counsel Jack Smith filed Tuesday in the 2020 election-interference case. After all, the lawfare campaign — the strategic timing of three Democratic prosecutors (two elected and one who works for the Biden-Harris administration) in filing four indictments meant to damage Trump in the 2024 campaign — makes a mockery of due process while unabashedly politicizing law enforcement.
With that as a given, any splashy lawfare development is “election interference” in that it furthers the partisan objective of using government police power to influence the election outcome. We all know that if the partisan roles were reversed, the media would be amplifying Democratic squawking rather than circling the wagons around Republican prosecutors. Plus, the theory of both Smith’s prosecution in Washington and District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution in Manhattan is that Trump corruptly influenced elections (2020 and 2016, respectively) for partisan purposes; it is fair political game, then, for Trump to limn Democrats as punishing him for having done exactly what they themselves are doing with impunity.
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