Trump Demands Prosecution of Merrick Garland and Jack Smith
By: Michael Luciano (Mediaite)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
President Donald Trump singled out a handful of former Justice Department officials on Friday night, saying they should be prosecuted for their roles in investigating him.
Writing on his Truth Social platform, Trump said:
Just in: Documents show conclusively that Christopher Wray, Deranged Jack Smith, Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, and other crooked lowlifes from the failed Biden Administration, signed off on Operation Arctic Frost. They spied on Senators and Congressmen/women, and even taped their calls. They cheated and rigged the 2020 Presidential Election. These Radical Left Lunatics should be prosecuted for their illegal and highly unethical behavior!
The president did not specify which documents he was talking about, but "Arctic Frost" refers to Smith's investigation into Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election, as well as his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Earlier this month, the Senate Judiciary Committee released an FBI document claiming that Smith "spied" on eight Republican senators as part of Smith's "Arctic Frost investigation."
In reality, Smith simply obtained metadata.
"The FBI in 2023 sought and obtained data about the senators' phone use from January 4 through January 7, 2021," the committee said. "That data shows when and to whom a call is made, as well as the duration and general location data of the call. The data does not include the content of the call."
As former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin noted at the time, the information was already publicly available, and Smith's actions were to be expected, given that Trump had been communicating with Republican elected officials about possibly overturning the election.
"It's not even news," Toobin said. "Jack Smith cites these conversations in his report. So this is not like he was trying to keep this a secret. And remember what Smith was investigating. He was investigating Donald Trump's attempts to overturn the election through the use of fake electors in Congress."
Smith was appointed as Special Counsel in November 2022 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland after Trump announced his third run for president. The following year, Smith obtained indictments against Trump for the election scheme, as well as Trump's retention of government documents after leaving office.
Lisa Monaco, whom Trump referenced, was Deputy Attorney General during Smith's investigation. Christopher Wray was the FBI director at the time. Trump appointed him to the position in 2017.
Trump previously called for the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).
In separate and unrelated cases, Comey and James were indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia for lying under oath and bank fraud, respectively. The indictments came after Trump ousted his handpicked U.S. Attorney, Erik Siebert, after Siebert indicated he could not muster viable cases against the two.
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The moron is guaranteeing any prosecutions will end in acquittal.
Comey filed a motion to dismiss his indictment and part of his evidence was 54 pages, each with from 6 to 10 examples, of Trump berating Comey and talking about how he belonged in jail.
It is a demonstration of just how warped one's perspective can get when Trump supporters continue to deny that Trump is vindictively abusing his power and engaging in blatant lawfare.
Those who endlessly claimed that Trump's Jan 6th and Classified Documents cases were lawfare (when the evidence was overwhelming against him) are now defending (and ignoring) Trump's illustration of what genuine lawfare by a PotUS looks like.
Blind partisanship (as is cultish devotion) is the opposite of critical thinking.
With Trump things always have to get worse, they never get better. He is a mentally ill chaos junkie.
www.theguardian.com /us-news/2025/oct/16/trump-authoritarianism-warning
US ‘on a trajectory’ toward authoritarian rule, ex-officials warn
Lauren Gambino 8-9 minutes 10/16/2025
The United States is “on a trajectory” toward authoritarian rule, according to a sobering new intelligence-style assessment by former US intelligence and national security officials, who warn that democratic backsliding is accelerating under the Trump administration – and may soon become entrenched without organized resistance.
The report, titled Accelerating Authoritarian Dynamics: Assessment of Democratic Decline, was released on Thursday by the Steady State, a network of more than 340 former officers of the CIA, the NSA, the state department and other national security agencies.
To conduct the assessment, the authors applied the same analytic methods used by US intelligence agencies to assess the fragility of democracies abroad but turned them inward for what the group called a “first-of-its-kind” analysis of domestic democratic decline.
“We wrote it because the same tools we once used to assess foreign risks now show unmistakable warning signs at home,” the group said in a statement upon its release.
The authors conclude with “moderate to high confidence” that the US is moving toward what scholars call “competitive authoritarianism”, a system in which elections and courts continue to function, but are “systematically manipulated” to consolidate executive power and weaken checks and balances. According to the assessment, these trends are increasingly visible in the US, as part of a broader effort by Donald Trump in his second presidential term to “ensure loyalty and ideological conformity” across the federal government.
“The speed with which we have devolved away from a fully functioning democracy is startling to me,” Gail Helt, a former CIA analyst and a member of the Steady State, said on a call with reporters after the assessment was published on Thursday. “In most cases, it takes longer than nine months to get where we are.”
Since returning to the White House, the president has pardoned January 6 rioters who assaulted police, fired independent watchdogs, purged career officials viewed as disloyal, publicly urged his attorney general to prosecute political opponents, deployed troops to US cities, attacked judges who ruled against him, threatened universities and restricted press freedom – all while testing the boundaries of executive power in ways federal courts have repeatedly deemed to be unlawful and unconstitutional.
Just last week, Trump’s justice department indicted Letitia James , the New York attorney general who successfully sued him for fraud, and separately charged the former FBI director James Comey , a longtime political adversary. He has also called for jailing the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker , and the Chicago mayor, Brandon Johnson, both Democrats who opposed his deployment of federal troops there.
The speed at which the administration was moving made it difficult to complete the assessment, Steven Cash, executive director of the Steady State, told reporters. “We would finish a draft and then five things would happen,” he said, adding that the document was published as a “baseline” that could be updated with new developments.
While the report mirrors the “finished intelligence” model used by the US intelligence community, the assessment was prepared by former analysts who no longer work in government and relied entirely on open-source material such as news reports, public statements and independent watchdog analyses, as opposed to classified intelligence. Its authors also emphasize that they were not driven by politics, but by what they saw as a need for a “cold, analytic look” at how the indicators of democratic backsliding applied to the US.
“These are people who have seen these indicators develop in countries that shifted dramatically away from democracy towards authoritarianism,” Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior intelligence official who spent two decades at the NSA, told reporters on Thursday. “And we’re seeing those things happening in our country today.”
Among the key indicators of democratic decline identified in the report: the expansion of executive power through unilateral decrees and emergency authorities; the politicization of the civil service and federal law enforcement; attempts to erode judicial independence through strategic appointments and “noncompliance” with court rulings or investigations; a weakened and increasingly ineffective Congress; partisan manipulation of electoral systems and administration; and the deliberate undermining of civil society, the press and public trust.
Trump supporters are blind to this. It is like some form of Stockholm syndrome. They see what Trump is doing but continue to rationalize. "Nothing to see here" "Hair on fire" "Biden did the same thing" ... on and on.
Many of them support it and want nothing more than an authoritarian ruler.
When the ruler is beating down all the people you hate, they're your hero, not a villain. There are quite a few rightwing conservatives who would love nothing more than to have all the lgtbq, Muslims, Jews and non-English speaking immigrants rounded up into camps, and they would call the guy who did it a hero. It's why there are still so many within the rightwing conservative Trump base who silently support what Hitler did by rounding up "all the lgtbq, Muslims, Jews and non-German speaking immigrants" into camps. And now they are vocally supporting Trump as he lightly follows in their hero's footsteps sending his Gestapo after those the conservative base hate and sending the clearly corrupt DOJ after Trumps enemies.