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The mask has finally slipped completely. Newly released documents, dropped by Senator Chuck Grassley on Tuesday, show that Jack Smith, the special counsel who spent years trying to put Donald Trump in prison, was holding secret strategy sessions with the very judges who would later preside over cases against the former president. According to these documents, which include briefing notes from January 2023 after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith as special counsel, Smith’s team met with federal judges Beryl Howell and James Boasberg — both Obama appointees who went on to make headline-grabbing rulings against Trump. The notes explicitly state that Judge Howell ‘liked our approach’ to executive privilege litigation and ‘loves the idea’ of consolidating motions against Trump officials.
And that’s not all. These notes reveal that Howell was aware an omnibus motion was coming and approved of the strategy in advance, which raises serious questions about judicial impartiality. Senator Ted Cruz, who has been leading hearings on the weaponization of the justice system, called Smith’s work a ‘modern Watergate’ scandal based on these revelations. The documents also indicate that Smith’s team was in regular contact with FBI officials, testing the boundaries of executive privilege and separation of powers while subpoenaing phone records of Republican senators and Trump allies.
But the White House responded forcefully to these findings, with spokeswoman Abigail Jackson stating, ‘We have long known that Judge Boasberg is a far-left judicial activist trying to undermine the President’s lawful authority; this is just further proof.’ Some legal observers have tried to downplay the significance of these meetings, noting that chief judges handle grand jury matters, but that misses the point entirely. The issue is the substance of what was discussed and the apparent enthusiasm from the bench for prosecutorial strategies targeting Trump — when a judge tells prosecutors she ‘loves’ their approach before seeing the actual evidence, that’s not judicial neutrality.
Trump called the investigations a witch hunt from day one, and with each new document release from sources like Senator Grassley’s office, it becomes clearer that he was right.
Providence watches over the bold.
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