Me, last week, on the gag order requested by Special Counsel Jack Smith given Donald Trump's threatening social media outbursts against Smith, Judge Tanya Chutkan, and other court officers:
This is hardball stuff on the part of Smith and the DoJ, and of course nobody should be surprised by the part where Trump violated this order almost immediately Friday evening and is risking Chutkan citing him for contempt. In fact, I expect Trump will absolutely push this as far as he can because he wants the process to break down. He wants riots and violence and bloodshed if she does try to put him behind bars, and he's going to all but openly dare her to do so.
Conservative former WSJ columnist Jason Willick writing in the NY Times about the gag order request:
I think the election interference case against Trump is legally flawed and — to the extent that it is valid — unwise to prosecute in the middle of an election season. The criminal-legal system, with all its punitive strictures, wasn’t designed to function with leading presidential candidates as defendants. And the presidential election system, with all its fierce competition and vituperative debate, wasn’t designed to function with defendants as candidates.
But there’s no going back. Smith’s insistence on indicting Trump over the 2020 election and trying him in the 2024 election year, combined with Republican voters’ insistence on making Trump their party’s presidential front-runner, has set up an inexorable clash between democratic politics and the law. There’s no fine-tuning it, no gentling of the legal and political processes to satisfy both. This is a head-on collision, and one or the other must yield.
I’m tempted to condemn Smith’s request for a gag order as an intrusion on the 2024 election, but that would miss the point. The Justice Department has already decided to thrust itself into the middle of the election. It might as well follow through: Prohibit Trump from attacking the proceedings, and when he doesn’t comply, jail him for contempt mid-campaign. Isn’t that what Attorney General Merrick Garland means when he says “no person is above the law”? Prosecutors have made their bed; they should lie in it.
Willick goes on hitting every conservative talking point on the January 6th case: that Trump cannot be prosecuted as a former president or current candidate (meaning Trump is above the law), that this is really a first amendment case that should be dismissed out of court (which it's not given the dozens of charges in Smith's case), that the people won't stand for the prosecution (when the majority of Americans do support the prosecution), that Democrats will suffer the most in the future being rounded up and jailed (which is all the more reason to make Trump an example), that only the voters should be able to determine Trump's fate (which they have, twice) and that this doesn't happen in civilized countries (where South Korea, Mexico, France and plenty of other US allies have prosecuted former presidents and PMs.)
In other words, it's steaming bullshit. But the taunting of Willick for Merrick Garland to follow through on ringing up Trump for violating the gag order is again, deliberate.
Trump wants this in order to justify massive national violence, and Willick is well aware of the plan.
We'll see if Trump forces Judge Chutkan's hand, but if it happens, it's going to have consequences.
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