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The Jack Smith Operation Shows Lawfare Will Only Get Worse

 Conservatives have yet to build the institutions, infrastructure, and legal capacity needed to counter lawfare before it destroys more lives.

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Lawfare grows more dangerous with every operation. This week’s disclosures about Jack Smith’s operation show how far that machinery reached.

We already knew about Smith’s sweeping indictments of President Trump on flimsy charges and many of the operation’s other abuses, including the secret seizure of phone records from Republican lawmakers, the review of text messages involving 44 members of Congress, and subpoenas seeking records on at least 430 Republican individuals and entities. This week, we also found out that Smith’s team of lawfare operators spied on nearly 50 journalists, including Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist.

They seized copies of 4,782 checks written by Americans who donated to Trump and Republican groups, exposing donors’ names, home addresses, bank and routing numbers, and signatures. These were ordinary Americans dragged into the lawfare simply because they wrote a check to support a political candidate. Smith also swept up records of people who had run pro-Trump ads. The sheer extent of the intrusions and abuses is incredible. 

We can get furious about each round of revelations, with every new disclosure producing another round of outrage. But the real lesson, and the far more frightening reality we have to grapple with, is that lawfare keeps getting more sophisticated and more vicious.

In many ways, this progression began in crude form in 2004, when 60 Minutes aired a false story about President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. The broadcast relied on documents claiming Bush had received favorable treatment and failed to meet his obligations. Lawyer Harry MacDougald, a through-line in fighting lawfare over the years, exposed those documents as forgeries. Dan Rather, who ran the story, was ultimately forced to resign.

Perhaps not coincidentally, MacDougald now represents Jeff Clark, the former Trump administration assistant attorney general who became a prominent victim of the far more developed lawfare system that followed. Clark was targeted by the Jack Smith operation and by the ongoing campaign to strip him of his law license. And MacDougald himself has been pulled into the same machinery, with an ethics complaint targeting him over his legal work in election-related cases.

The 2004 operation was a political hoax, but it was not quite lawfare. It had some of lawfare’s common elements: fabricated evidence, a hoax laundered through a major media outlet that actively carried the attack, and the political objective of defeating its target (Bush). But the operation was crude, and its defining weapon was missing. The state’s investigative and prosecutorial power had not been turned against Bush or his associates to surveil them, prosecute them, bankrupt them, or imprison them.

By 2016, the method had become far more sophisticated. Russiagate became the origin of what we now know as lawfare. It began with a fabricated narrative, then built an entire operational ecosystem around it. Instead of simply laundering a false story through one 60 Minutes broadcast, the story was laundered through Christopher Steele, who received it from a firm hired by the Clinton campaign and repackaged it as a quasi-British intelligence product. Additionally, a made-up story about Trump communicating with Russia through Russia’s Alfa Bank was laundered through a team of purported computer scientists to give it a veneer of credibility. Those false narratives were then released through a whole network of media lawfare collaborators.

Most importantly, for the first time, the operation brought the legal and law enforcement machinery to bear. With the help of FBI Director James Comey and CIA Director John Brennan, the fabricated narrative became a federal operation, using investigations, surveillance warrants, leaks, and a special counsel to try first to defeat candidate Trump and, when that failed, to remove him from office. The operation targeted not just Trump, but the people around him. Campaign figures, advisers, associates, and people with only loose connections to Trump were dragged into the investigation. They faced legal bills, public smears, professional ruin, bankruptcy, and, in some cases, prison. The purpose was to isolate Trump, cripple his ability to govern, and make anyone who stood with him pay a price. It largely succeeded.

Russiagate brought the elements of lawfare together in one coordinated campaign. But it was only a precursor to the next evolution, which we are seeing more and more clearly with Jack Smith. He took the 2016 playbook and multiplied its viciousness, reach, and breadth until Russiagate looked like kindergarten. His operation pursued Trump through criminal cases while drawing in lawyers, lawmakers, journalists, conservative political organizations, and thousands of ordinary Americans whose only connection was making perfectly legal political donations, many for tiny amounts.

This should make everyone stop and confront what is happening. In 20 years, we went from a forged document aired on television to a federal operation targeting conservative journalists and random Americans. The target list keeps growing, the abuses keep expanding, and the people responsible keep acting as if the next escalation will never be challenged.

The point must be unmistakably understood: they will try again. The next operation will be more sophisticated, more sweeping, and more ruthless. It will borrow every method used before and build new ones around them. Much time has already been wasted in the second Trump term, leaving only a narrow window to prepare for what might come after the 2026 midterms or in 2029.

While the lawfare machinery has occupied the field largely unopposed and grown ever more sophisticated, conservatives have yet to build the institutions, infrastructure, strategic framework, and legal capacity needed to expose and counter lawfare before it destroys more lives and institutions. Case by case, defendant by defendant, the machinery will keep winning. It has to be confronted as a system.

But even that would not substitute for what is most needed and most absent: accountability. To this day, no one other than Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer who forged a document in the effort to target Trump, has been held to account. He got off with a slap on the wrist. The operators, including Comey, Brennan, and Smith, got off scot-free. And unlike in 2004, when his participation in the hoax cost Dan Rather his job, the media participants in lawfare have faced no accountability either.

All of this has to change, or lawfare will only get worse.

https://thefederalist.com/2026/10/02/the-jack-smith-operation-shows-lawfare-will-only-get-worse/

https://thefederalist.com/2026/10/02/climate-activists-want-the-supreme-court-to-impose-a-green-new-deal-that-voters-rejected/

https://thefederalist.com/2026/10/02/poll-6-in-10-americans-oppose-democrats-plan-to-pack-the-supreme-court/

Ketanji Brown Jackson Throws a Fit As Supreme Court Backs SAVE Voter Verification

 Why would this Idiot that can't define what a woman is be upset about voter verification?    She wants the cheating?

The justice’s dissent over the SAVE voter-verification system continues her increasingly public dispute with the  Court’s majority.

The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may use the SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database for voter-verification purposes. Pursuant to an executive order issued by President Trump last March, about half of the nation’s 50 states have been accessing the database to assure that their voter rolls contain only American citizens living within their jurisdictions. In June, however, Biden-appointed District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled that it was unconstitutional for the DHS to share the database with states. Friday’s SCOTUS ruling granted the Trump DOJ’s request for a stay. And Justice  Jackson was not pleased. 

Justice Jackson has earned a reputation for radicalism. Her solo dissents have provoked justified criticism from her liberal as well as  her conservative Court colleagues.

She responded with a 12-page dissent that accused the Court’s majority of misreading both Supreme Court precedent and U.S. statutes by allowing the DHS and the White House to unilaterally expand the executive branch’s authority. Jackson’s dissent was full of cheap shots at the majority and infantile analogies such as the following: “[I]n balancing the equities, the majority only looks at one side of the scale — the judicial equivalent of expecting a seesaw with weight applied on only one side to work properly.” This was meant to refute the majority’s opinion that the judge’s ruling “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”

Appointed by former President Biden in 2022, Justice Jackson is the Supreme Court’s youngest and least experienced member. Evidently, it has never occurred to her that this calls for a certain amount of humility. Instead, she has emerged as one of the most vocal critics of its practices and her more seasoned colleagues — in written opinions as well as public speeches. Indeed, the night before the Court’s latest ruling was released, she spoke at the University of the District of Columbia’s law school where she sharply criticized the manner in which the Court manages its emergency docket. She had the audacity to advise her fellow justices to use the emergency docket less often. The New York Times reports that she added the following remarks: 

“If we’re not careful, the emergency docket can and will become an end run around the standard review process, a special avenue that certain privileged litigants can use selectively,” Justice Jackson said. “Why is it that one party should get a fast pass to the Supreme Court of the United States when so many other parties are queued up, waiting patiently for the  court’s attention?”

The “privileged litigant” she meant was, of course, President Trump. She knows perfectly well that his Justice Department has been forced to appeal to the Court via the emergency docket because Democrat-appointed activist judges have been engaged in a judicial insurrection against the Trump administration. In case after case, lower court judges handed down nationwide injunctions against various Trump policies despite lacking any legal jurisdiction to do so. Eventually, this problem got so out of hand that the Supreme Court had to intervene. First, the Court granted the administration partial stays on a number of these injunctions because they exceeded the authority of the lower  courts. Then it ruled on Trump v. CASA:

On June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc., a trio of consolidated cases in which the Court limited the ability of federal courts to block federal laws and policies. The  Court held that the Judiciary Act of 1789 does not authorize nationwide injunctions that reach more broadly than needed to provide complete relief to parties to a case, but left open several potential avenues for litigants to seek universal relief.

That should have put an end to the antics of these activist judges. But many simply disregarded the Court’s ruling or attempted end runs around the decision. In fact, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), no fewer than 16 nationwide injunctions were issued by lower courts in the 12-month period between June 28, 2025 and June 27, 2026. As crazy as it sounds, that is actually an improvement. During the period between January 20, 2025 and the date SCOTUS ruled on Trump v. CASA a whopping 34 nationwide injunctions were issued by lower courts. So, when Justice Jackson claims that she doesn’t know why the emergency docket has been used so much, she is lying. This is not making her friends on the Court.

Since her confirmation, Justice Jackson has earned a reputation for radicalism. Her solo dissents have provoked justified criticism from her liberal as well as her conservative Court colleagues.  Some of her dissents read as if they were written in clueless social media posts. In her dissent in Louisiana v. Callais she actually accused the majority of “acting as proxies for their favored political parties.” Justice Alito angrily referred to that as “baseless and insulting.” He added that it was “a groundless and utterly irresponsible charge.” But this is the way Democrats of all stripes talk about the Court. If Republican voters are stupid enough to sit out the midterms and allow the Democrats to retake Congress many more KBJs will land on the Supreme Court.

https://spectator.org/ketanji-brown-jackson-throws-a-fit-as-supreme-court-backs-save-voter-verification/

This guy is a Dumbass!

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/10/dem-sen-mark-kelly-says-his-solution-cost/