'The ultimate Greek tragedy': Ari Melber shows how Trump guaranteed his own indictment
Former President Donald Trump's indictment in the 2020 election plot was his own doing — and not, argued MSNBC's Ari Melber, simply because he committed the acts for which he was indicted, but also because his strategy to avoid indictment actually backfired on him and guaranteed it would happen.
In this way, Melber argued, Trump has become a star of his own "Greek tragedy" — comparable to the tale of Oedipus, who learned of a prophecy where he kills his father and marries his mother, and desperately tries to avoid this fate by leaving his town and cutting off all contact with his family, and, in so doing, actually sets in motion a chain of events that ensures the prophecy comes true.
Specifically, Melber argued, Trump's plan to avoid indictment was to announce his campaign for president as soon as possible, in the hope it would make investigating him too politically charged for the Justice Department.
"Trump didn't just jump in a few months, he announced 15 months out in November 2022, which made for this unusual precedent," said Melber. "It was the earliest presidential candidacy declaration in modern history ... and it was done at his home front gathering, sometimes panned as looking lackluster or rushed."
The problem, Melber continued, was that this blew up in his face. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who had come under criticism for allegedly slow-walking investigations into the former president, appointed Jack Smith as special counsel and handed off all the investigations of Trump to him to avoid any appearance of political impropriety in investigating a rival presidential candidate — and Smith turned out to be much more aggressive and fast, building up a case against Trump in time to bring charges before the election.
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"Facts show DOJ was not on track to indict Trump," said Melber. "Without trump's early campaign announcement, there's no special counsel Jack Smith. It is the ultimate Greek tragedy — Donald Trump trying to outrun his fate and sealing it himself. That alone is interesting. You might say, okay, Ari, cool story, or tragic play, but if Trump was just delaying his campaign announcement, if that's the only quibble, then eventually if Trump declared, wouldn't Garland use that same rule to appoint a special counsel and then the probe would heat back up? If this were dinner party talk, that would be the rebuttal. I have an answer for you too, right now: no, actually. According to our legal analysis, we can show you this new tonight. It's clear. Trump did his announcement early back in November 2022. As I showed you, Jack Smith appointed just days after that. Within seven months, Smith indicts the espionage and docs case, coup charge is last week, and this is, as you can see, long before what's on the far right, the 2024 primaries."
The upshot, said Melber, is that "Trump's early move gave Smith, who's a fast worker, this early start of the sorts, the seven months to do this work before getting anywhere near those primaries. That's a wrap."
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