Dem
51
GOP
49
Meanwhile, as the plot of the Mar-a-Lago documents case thickens, and then thickens some more (what is it, concrete-level thick at this point?), Slate has a piece headlined: "Trump Was Implicated in a Vote Machine Theft. Why Isn't DOJ Investigating?"
The headline kind of says it all, but as a reminder, members of the Trump campaign, aided by Coffee County, GA, officials who were friendly to their cause, managed to acquire a voting machine and the software installed upon it. That same software runs all the machines in Georgia, incidentally, and was posted to a website where it could be accessed by Trump-allied election deniers across the country. All of this is illegal, and there is ample evidence that the matter was discussed multiple times at meetings where Donald Trump was present. Ipso facto, he is complicit in any crimes that took place.
We pass this item along for one reason. Despite the headline, Slate has no way of knowing whether or not the DoJ is looking into this. Jack Smith and his team do not share details of their daily activities until they are absolutely forced to do so. And, in practice, that means when they finally make a court filing. We often get questions, including one we answered this weekend, about what is taking Smith so long. And the fact is that there are so many things he and his team could be looking into that there's no way to know what they actually are looking into, or how much progress they have made.
Recall that the Durham investigation, which finally wrapped up this week, took more than 4 years, and was ultimately looking at questions that were much simpler and of much less consequence. Smith will move faster than Durham, because he has no choice, and because a lot of the work was done before he was on the job. That means that when Smith does go for an indictment, assuming he does, it will actually come pretty quickly by the usual standards of a federal investigation. Until that day, however, there's nothing for politics-watchers to do, except be patient. (Z)