Donald Trump's criminal cases were 'not optional' for Jack Smith: Ex-prosecutor

In a Saturday opinion piece entitled "Ignore Jack Smith’s Critics," a former U.S. attorney and Bush official says the criminal charges brought against Donald Trump are to be celebrated, not lamented.

Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general under President George H.W. Bush who previously said special counsel Smith could prove Trump participated in an insurrection, said for the Atlanticthat too many in the media are claiming that the former president being charged is a travesty. In reality, he says, it should be considered a necessary consequence of a fair society.

"For a free society wishing to preserve its governmental system, the prosecutions of Donald Trump for trying to overturn our democracy and willfully mishandling national secrets is not optional," Ayer wrote on Saturday. "They are the essential step that must be taken if America’s rule of law is going to survive, and be worthy of the trust that is essential to that survival. More hopefully, they offer the nation its single best chance of escaping from the appalling thrall of Trump’s lies and insults since he came down that escalator eight years ago."

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Going even further, Ayer then says he "cannot imagine a more serious set of offenses by a sitting president against the nation than working deliberately to overturn the result of a democratic election—one that he clearly knew from his closest advisers he had lost—or illegally squirreling away and refusing to return some of the country’s most sensitive secrets."

He then adds:

"The seriousness is greatly magnified in the first instance by the extent and persistence of the conduct at issue, spanning many months and transcending multiple states and means used to change the electoral outcome. In the documents case, again, the amount of classified material and the persistence of evasive efforts to avoid returning the materials is breathtaking."

Read the full piece here.