General Discussion

Maybe Smith is a brilliant prosecutor when playing by the rules of a fair and impartial court. But he totally misjudged -- and bungled -- this situation. Many of us have been saying all along that the course he and Garland were on would never get this into trial before the election.

And it was not a case of, "He did his best under the circumstances of a sabotaging AG and a rigged court system." There were absolutely other options available to him and he never should have been pursuing the "Mother of all Conspiracy cases" strategy. That was never going to work.

The course that had the best chances of going to trial long before the election and resulting in sanctions that would have prevented Trump's running for office was to assemble a smaller case consisting only of the elements of crimes that unquestionably were committed within the bailiwick of the DC Circuit. Maybe that would have failed also, for the same reason that none of Epstein's adventures and collaborators have ever been exposed as the sex traffickers they all were. That is to say, even a limited case within the DC Circuit might have been threatening to so many people in the Beltway that even that would have been blocked. But that was the only course that had a chance.

I have no idea what the hell Smith thought he could accomplish by sending this to the 11th. Or maybe Smith didn't really want it to go to trial. Who knows? Garland sure didn't.