Posted on 10/04/2026 8:37:42 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Conservatives have yet to build the institutions, infrastructure, and legal capacity needed to counter lawfare before it destroys more lives.
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.
Impending civil war. Why did all of the Democrats not think that there would eventually be retribution? Seriously, did they think that they could that easily subjugate and/or kill all those opposing them. Really?
He was a FReeper and blew it up right here.
“If we assume that everybody in DC has extortion material on everybody else”
Congress has Article I, Section 8 “necessary and proper” power.
A simple law will do:
The following provisions shall become effective one year after enactment:
No person elected to Congress shall be subject to any legal action that could have been filed prior to primary election day stemming from actions at least 60 days prior to that day.
No person in federal judicial office shall be subject to any legal action that could have been filed prior to the day of their Senate confirmation stemming from actions at least 60 days prior to that day.
“Unintended Consequences is a Libertarian propaganda novel serving as a treatise on the history of firearms rights in the United States of America, which has been compared by many public figures to works written by Ayn Rand. Originally published in 1996, the copywrite was preemptively terminated by the author, Mr. John Ross in 2009, as indicated on the more recent softcover editions of the book, which were published beginning in 2010. The text is therefore now in the public domain, though the movie rights to the work are retained by the author.”
https://archive.org/details/unintended-consequences-by-John-Ross/mode/2up
But Jack Smith was also investigating people who made campaign donations to Trump.
No bias there.
By the way, to the author of that Archive article: I'll take a page out out the Leftist's playbook--the word you are looking for is "copyright".
If “Jack Smith” really is his name...
Deprivation Of Rights Under Color Of Law
Summary:
Section 242 of Title 18 makes it a crime for a person acting under color of any law to willfully deprive a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.
For the purpose of Section 242, acts under “color of law” include acts not only done by federal, state, or local officials within their lawful authority, but also acts done beyond the bounds of that official’s lawful authority, if the acts are done while the official is purporting to or pretending to act in the performance of his/her official duties. Persons acting under color of law within the meaning of this statute include police officers, prisons guards and other law enforcement officials, as well as judges, care providers in public health facilities, and others who are acting as public officials. It is not necessary that the crime be motivated by animus toward the race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin of the victim.
The offense is punishable by a range of imprisonment up to a life term, or the death penalty, depending upon the circumstances of the crime, and the resulting injury, if any.
TITLE 18, U.S.C., SECTION 242
Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, ... shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both....
https://www.justice.gov/crt/deprivation-rights-under-color-law
“Deprivation of a Constitutional or Federal Right
The victim must have lost a right protected by the Constitution or federal law. The rights invoked most often are the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures....”
“For violations that do not result in death, federal prosecutors have five years from the date of the offense to bring charges. This is the standard federal limitations period for non-capital crimes.”
https://fedlaws.org/18-usc-242-deprivation-of-rights-under-color-of-law/
Going after people’s lawyers is very nasty.
That is what I have thought most of these lawfare cases are. The J6 and Russiagate hoaxes also have conspiracy elements.
“Trump won’t turn the tables...” - Maybe he’s in on it...
Is it to much to see that from LBJ, to the Bushes, to Obama-lama-ding-dong, to Trump, the same folks are in charge and whomever is appointed (elected) follows orders?!?!
Cops and Military will also follow orders.
Same...
I heard Rush report on how the story came out. That is how I found Free Republic. My join date was 2004.
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.
___________________________________________________
I hadn’t even heard that. Jack Smith and the people working with him are awful. Who knows what awaits ordinary conservative Americans if the Socialists take over!
There is only one way this crap is brought to an end...
Americans need to react as if it is April 19, 1775.
Yep, buckhead I think
Start arresting these scumbags NOW!. The Dems sent FBI to peoples houses to arrest them and ask questions later. Unless you start doing the same, this will not stop. No more nice play, it gets us nowhere!
Jack Smith must be a lonely person he keeps saying the stupidest things to be noticed.
He’s crying all the way to the bank.
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