Adversaries Jack Smith and Todd Blanche Agree on One Thing: Trump’s 2024 Win Kept Him Out of Prison

America’s top law enforcement official holds a strikingly similar view to President Trump’s archnemesis, Jack Smith: that the results of the 2024 election kept the president from prison.Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whom President Trump has suggested may get the job on a permanent basis, told Sean Hannity on Tuesday that if Mr. Trump had not defeated Vice President Harris in 2024, he would today be behind bars. Mr. Hannity asked Mr. Blanche if the possibilities presented to Mr. Trump in the election were “either the White House or the big house.” Mr. Blanche responded, “Oh yeah, absolutely.” “Don’t forget, he had a D.C. case breathing down his neck, he had the Florida case — which had been dismissed but they were appealing it — and then he had a judge in New York where there’s no scenario in which (the judge) wasn’t going to send President Trump to prison. He didn’t, after the president won.” Mr. Blanche said. He added that the “consequences of 2024 for this country are priceless. But for him and his family, also priceless.”Mr. Blanche also told Mr. Hannity that he “found a room” at DOJ that contained so-called “burn bags” filled with material from Mr. Smith’s tenure. Mr. Blanche reckoned that “it’s not fair to say it was a secret room, but it’s a room that had a lot of material in it.” He speculated that an “honorable FBI agent might have left it there because it was not where it would normally be to be destroyed.”Mr. Blanche, who was a defense lawyer for Mr. Trump in three of the criminal cases levied against him, has been serving in an interim capacity since Attorney General Pam Bondi resigned in April. Asked on Pod Force One this week if Mr. Blanche will stay on, the president responded, “I think he will.” A permanent appointment for Mr. Blanche would require confirmation by the Senate. Mr. Blanche’s assessment is remarkably congruent with one that has been repeatedly offered by Mr. Smith, who led the two criminal cases against Mr. Trump. The first prosecution centered on the storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago — a hoarding that Mr. Smith alleged amounted to dozens of crimes of conspiracy and violations of the 1917 Espionage Act. Mr. Smith also sought to convict Mr. Trump for election interference in the wake of the 2020 vote.Both of those cases were dismissed after Mr. Trump regained the White House. In Mr. Smith’s final report on the election interference case, he wrote that evidence may have been sufficient to convict Mr. Trump “but for” the results of the presidential election. The special counsel doubled down on that claim in his testimony to Congress in January, telling lawmakers that Mr. Trump was guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt” for committing a “criminal scheme.”Mr. Smith blamed the ultimate failures of his cases on a Department of Justice policy that imposes a “categorical” prohibition on the prosecution of sitting presidents. The Justice Department’s position is that the “indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.”Mr. Smith’s cases, though, were in trouble even before Mr. Trump won a second term. In the summer of 2024 the Supreme Court, in Trump v. United States, reversed both a district and appellate court to find that official presidential acts are immune from prosecution while unofficial ones are bereft of that protection. That sent Mr. Smith back to the drawing board to seek a new indictment that he contended was consonant with that ruling. The Mar-a-Lago prosecution was even more beset by woes. Judge Aileen Cannon proved skeptical of the case from the outset, and she eventually ruled that Mr. Smith was unlawfully appointed by Ms. Bondi’s predecessor, Attorney General Merrick Garland. She also dismissed the charges against Mr. Trump and his co-defendants. Mr. Smith appealed, but the case was dropped when Mr. Trump moved back into the White House. Mr. Trump was also presented with the possibility of prison by the two state criminal prosecutions arrayed against him. He was convicted in New York’s hush money case but days before he swore the oath for a second time Judge Juan Merchan sentenced him only to an “unconditional discharge,” meaning no further punishment was ordered. The criminal racketeering case brought by the district attorney of Fulton County, Fani Willis, collapsed following the disclosure of her secret romance with a prosecutor in her office.Mr. Trump’s vote of confidence in Mr. Blanche came just a day after Mr. Blanche told Congress that the administration’s $1.8 billion ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ is being abandoned in the face of withering criticism from the president’s own party.

Adversaries Jack Smith and Todd Blanche Agree on One Thing: Trump’s 2024 Win Kept Him Out of Prison

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