She writes (subscription required):
Take Mr. Trump out of the equation and consider more broadly what even the New York Times calls Mr. Smith’s “novel approach.” A politician can lie to the public, Mr. Smith concedes. Yet if that politician is advised by others that his comments are untruthful and nonetheless uses them to justify acts that undermine government “function,” he is guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the country.Ms. Strassel goes on to give a number of other examples: Stacey Abrams falsely disputed her loss in the Georgia Governor's race in 2018. Rep. Adam Schiff and a host of FBI fabulists and prevaricators tore the country apart with the Russian collusion hoax they foisted on us for four or five years.
Dishonest politicians who act on dubious legal claims? There aren’t enough prisons to hold them all.
Consider how many politicians might already be doing time had prosecutors applied this standard earlier.
Both Al Gore and George W. Bush filed lawsuits in the 2000 election that contained bold if untested legal claims. Surely both candidates had advisers who told them privately that they may have legitimately lost—and neither publicly conceded an inch until the Supreme Court resolved the matter.
Might an ultimate sore winner have used this approach to indict the loser for attempting to thwart the democratic process?
And why limit the theory to election claims? In 2014 the justices held unanimously that President Barack Obama had violated the Constitution by decreeing that the Senate was in recess so that he could install several appointees without confirmation.
It was an outrageous move, one that Mr. Obama’s legal counselors certainly warned was a loser, yet the White House vocally insisted the president had total “constitutional authority” to do it. Under Mr. Smith’s standard, that was a lie that Mr. Obama used to defraud the public by jerry-rigging the function of a labor board with illegal appointments.
What’s the betting someone told President Biden he didn’t have the power to erase $430 billion in student loan debt. Oh, wait! That’s right. He told himself. “I don’t think I have the authority to do it by signing with a pen,” he said in 2021.
The House speaker advised him it was illegal: “People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not,” Nancy Pelosi said.
Yet Mr. Biden later adopted the lie that he did, and took action to defraud taxpayers by obstructing the federal function of loan processing—until the Supreme Court made him stop.
Somehow, though when Trump lies it's different. Strassel adds this:
The press is rooting for the special counsel to go after Republican lawmakers who on the basis of Mr. Trump’s claims objected to slates of electors on Jan. 6, 2021.Of course, doing so would cross a line that separates mature republics from third world authoritarianisms, but that's where the Democrats and the leftist media appear intent on taking us. They don't seem to care if they devastate what has become the greatest social, political and military experiment ever to exist in the history of civilization, in fact many of the leftmost of their number would dearly love to see it, as long as they wield the power in whatever manages to emerge from the ashes.
Let’s line them all up, including dozens of Democrats who objected to slates in 2001, 2005 and 2017—on the basis of lies and with the purpose of conspiring to obstruct (as the Smith indictment puts it) “the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified.”
