Beware of private correspondence posted on public websites.
Last week, lawyers for Donald Trump sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting a meeting to discuss the special counsel’s investigation into the former president. The letter comes as The Wall Street Journal reports that special counsel Jack Smith is nearing the end of his investigation into Trump’s possession of government documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence. The letter is a gimmick, a piece of propaganda designed to inflame passions and control the narrative. How do I know? The letter quite literally tells on itself.
A request for a meeting to discuss the investigation is therefore properly directed to Smith, not Garland.
First, the letter requests a meeting with Garland, even though he has named Smith as special counsel to handle the case. Garland appointed the special counsel in November after Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2024 in order to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. A request for a meeting to discuss the investigation is therefore properly directed to Smith, not Garland. Trump’s legal team, which includes former Justice Department lawyer James Trusty, certainly knows that. As former Justice Department spokesman Anthony Coley has explained, “Merrick Garland will not meet with Trusty or any of the other Trump lawyers. Jack Smith is running this investigation, not Merrick Garland.”
Why, then, would Trump’s team ask for such a meeting? Because they know Garland will decline. And when he does, you can bet Trump’s lawyers will wave around the refusal as proof of injustice. Trump will wail that this rejection proves once again that he is a victim of witch hunts and hoaxes. The predictability of Trump’s game would be tiresome if it were not so harmful to public trust in government institutions.
The second tell is the tone. The letter states, “No President of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly…
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