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.
And nobody to spend it on but the pets.
BTW, Jack Smith worked at The Hague.
Yes
Correct. They use every scheme and only start crying when the same is used against them.
Republicans fight using Queensberry Rules, with no hitting below the belt.
Liberals fighting using Schoolyard rules and start by kicking Republicans in the balls.
Well put.
Many, if not most democrats consider Hack Smith a righteous hero and they have to overlook alot of unethical behavior and illegality to think that. But they do think that because they've been utterly brainwashed to hate Trump and those of us who voted for him.
Smith should be up on charges just from spying on Congressman through phone records.
And an excellent place to start might be with Jack Smith & his bunch, whoever they be.
Trump refuses to arrest those involved.
He said he could have put hillary clinton in jail but did not because she was the wife of a former president.
The end result was multiple assassination attempts that left 2 dead and 1 wounded and the democrats are still trying to get Trump murdered.
Just like in Iran he thinks he talk to psychopaths. You either kill them (Iran) or lock the democrats up for decades.
“Jack Smith’s operation show how far that machinery reached.”
And yet he will continue to smirk and knowingly smile about how no consequences will ever result beyond some limp-wristed clown show for the cameras which no one will ever remember.
As soon as the democrats are installed again they will award him his back pay and punitive damages and set him back on his way to continue his illegal lawfare.
This is why Brennen, Comey, et al need to be behind bars. Why has that not happened? Where are the trials? Will we see them after the mid-terms? Please?
This is why Brennen, Comey, et al need to be behind bars. Why has that not happened? Where are the trials? Will we see them after the mid-terms? Please?
Oooh, lots to unpick there.
“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...”
But the problem there is, both side argue this is legit when THEY are doing it. The exact same processes that Jack Smith followed have been followed in previous cases, and it makes no difference if past investigations were pulling information from Democrats only, from Republicans only, or from people on both sides of the camp. One side always complains it’s targeted lawfare while the other side doing it argues that the evidence leads where it leads.
“lawfare keeps getting more sophisticated and more vicious” / “Republicans fight using Queensberry Rules, with no hitting below the belt.”
Really? Smith is spending half his time responding to INANE and IRRELEVANT questions, and the other half of his time getting machine-gunned with nothing-burgers.
Lawfare against Jack Smith is what ultimately led to that basketball match fiasco. Eric Schmidt started off with ad-hominem attacks that had no relevance to his case, and he made more than one insinuation that perjury had been committed. But then it turned out that Schmidt had even been told the “evidence” had not been validated and might prove nothing. It then turned out both Eric Schmidt and Katie Britt had been either too sexist OR too stupid to think to look at WOMENS basketball matches on that day. So, their own cognitive bias overload led them to get the teams, stadium AND the city all wrong and they comprehensively proved that Smith was innocent of the charge they were levelling at him.
Eric Schmidt’s perjury trap always was about as subtle as an anvil, but it must’ve been an Acme anvil because of the way it landed on Schmidt’s own head instead of Smith’s - the only way it could’ve been more comical is if there’d been a low zoom into Kate... oh, yeah. That happened too.
Another problem: if you want to talk about serial lawfare, what about the (now approaching sixty) other investigations by various agencies that have forensically looked into the election fraud issue at this administration’s insistence... where not a single one has found enough evidence to support a national conspiracy argument?
It has become an industry, at every level, everywhere, and it is STILL ongoing. Kash Patel has been ordered by the White House, yet again, to make the finding of evidence of the Election Steal a priority... so there’s even more “lawfare” to come.
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