Politico’s “journalists” must’ve woken up in a cold sweat over the need to warn the nation of “The Coming Trump Revenge Tour.” In their telling, Donald Trump might — gasp — weaponize the Justice Department against his political opponents.

That was Monday. Fast-forward all the way to Wednesday, and the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris Justice Department reminded everyone how it has already been weaponized against Trump and why he might just want to rectify things.

Here’s how it happened. U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Tanya Chutkan, who is clearly antagonistic to Trump, unsealed Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page court filing in the case against the former president for contesting the results of the 2020 election. While the trial against Trump isn’t going to happen before the 2024 election, Democrats get to smear him with the charges in the court of public opinion to influence this election while people are already voting. Call it the October Non-Surprise.

Specifically, Smith says, “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost.”

“Overturn” and “legitimate” are doing an awful lot of work in that sentence, and I’ll come back to that.

First, let’s remember that Smith’s very appointment is constitutionally suspect. He’s also technically not the DOJ. He’s “independent” — you know, like those “third-party fact-checkers” Facebook pays to be “independent” speech suppressors. But anyone who’s ever heard a speech by Joe Biden or Kamala “The Prosecutor” Harris knows that Smith is doing to Trump exactly what the Democrat playbook says: Target the former president with lawfare to ensure he’s the GOP nominee and then beat him in court and at the polls.

Smith’s real job isn’t enforcing the Rule of Law but weaponizing the courts against the Republican presidential candidate to ensure that Democrats win.

After the Supreme Court’s July ruling on presidential immunity essentially torpedoed much of the Democrat lawfare against Trump, Smith regrouped and argued that Trump’s “scheme was fundamentally a private one” and, therefore, subject to prosecution. As legal analyst Jonathan Turley noted, “He is trying to thread the needle in this filing to get around the Supreme Court immunity decision. Notably, Smith removed evidence from the new indictment but kept the same claims, including conduct that seems to fall within protected areas.”

By now, of course, The Narrative™ is well established; Smith is just retelling it. Trump lost fair and square but illegally schemed to steal the election and incited an insurrection to help him do it.

That brings me back to the words “overturn” and “legitimate” because those speak to motive.

The same Democrats who’ve contested every presidential election they’ve lost over the last two decades insist that the 2020 election was the most secure in the history of the planet and that there’s no possible way any fraud happened at all. Without evidence, Smith assumes that as an established fact in his indictment.

As I have written before, though, just because the fraud in 2020 was legal doesn’t make it legitimate. The bulk-mail ballots alone are enough for any reasonable person to think 2020 was not legitimate. An astounding 66 million ballots were cast by mail in 2020 — 43% of the total — and signature verification in most states is pathetically insufficient. The idea that every last one of those ballots was totally legitimate is preposterous. Even Jimmy Carter warned of the potential for mail ballot fraud in 2005.

Oh, and by the way, one in five mail-in voters admitted to cheating in 2020. It’s just really tough to prove.

That’s also to say nothing of the other shenanigans in 2020, which included Leftmedia and Big Tech censorship of Biden family corruption. That suppression likely changed the outcome all by itself because, had voters known about the influence-peddling scheme being run by Joe Biden’s drug-addled son Hunter before the election, fewer of them would have voted to bring that kind of “decency” and “integrity” back to Washington. One might argue that such suppression amounted to election fraud.

Again, though, Smith just assumes that the 2020 election was “legitimate” for the purposes of charging and smearing Trump.

He also argues that Trump tried to “overturn” the election — as if the autocratic tyrant was destroying democracy, just like Biden said. Yet Trump genuinely thought he won. He was taking any and every action through the legal process to contest the results he considered fraudulent. That some of those efforts were far-fetched and eyebrow-raising doesn’t necessarily make them illegal.

Besides, does Trump’s (admittedly embarrassing) failure to prove his case in court in a matter of only a few weeks mean he was wrong? Is every court verdict the right one just because it was a court verdict?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Trump’s post-election behavior was sometimes reprehensible — especially his treatment of his most loyal lieutenant, Mike Pence. I also think Democrats chose their opponent well because someone like Ron DeSantis would be leading Kamala Harris by 10 points. But none of that means Trump is a criminal, and the Democrats’ use of the legal system as a campaign tool against their chosen opponent is the real afront to our Republic.

Will Smith’s filing sway any voters? It probably won’t change any minds, but Smith is clearly hoping it might discourage some reluctant Trump voters from casting a ballot for him.

Finally, to circle back to the idea of weaponizing government, that can work both ways. Just as Smith is carrying out Justice Department wishes by colluding with a sympathetic judge to tarnish Trump just before the election, the DOJ says the National Archives has delayed the release of records related to the aforementioned Biden Crime Family. Good thing Kamala Harris has barely even heard of Joe Biden, right?

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