I was on indictment watch today but the grand jury seems to have beat it. That is NOT the technical term, but I have to hide my disappointment somehow. I’m hoping that the coup case will feature other defendants like Rudy and John Eastman. The more the merrier.

I’m trying out a new nickname after this zinger from Judge McBurney in the Georgia case:

“And for some, being the subject of a criminal investigation can, a la Rumpelstiltskin, be turned into golden political capital, making it seem more providential than problematic.”

That’s one funny Georgia judge.

Since Rumpelstiltskin transforms straw to gold, I don’t think Trumpelstiltskin works. Everything the Indicted Impeached Insult Comedian touches turns to shit. That makes him King Midas In Reverse but not Trumpelstiltskin. Oh well, what the hell.

Before we leave this fractured fairy tale, a word about Special Counsel Jack Smith. I considered calling him the Village Smithy but thought better of it. Besides, who knows what a blacksmith is in 2023?

The nickname fits Jack Smith’s muscular and aggressive style as a prosecutor. But he looks nothing like Donald Duck as The Village Smithy:

That was quite a tangent. I intended to make another point about Jack Smith altogether. Let’s try again.

There’s a fantastic op-ed in the NYT by Gary J. Bass. It’s about Jack Smith’s time in The Hague as a war crimes prosecutor. When you’ve dealt with murderous Kosovars, nothing else seems hard.

I dig the ending to the Bass piece:

“Mr. Trump is already instinctively following a similar playbook of bluster and intimidation, even though he is facing not an international tribunal but the laws of the United States. He has compared the F.B.I. agents investigating him to the Gestapo, smeared Mr. Smith as “deranged” and crudely warned on an Iowa radio show that it would be “very dangerous” to imprison him, since he has “a tremendously passionate group of voters.”

Yet Mr. Trump will find that Mr. Smith has dealt with the likes of him — and worse — before. The American prosecutor is well equipped to pursue the vision of a predecessor, Robert H. Jackson, the eloquent Supreme Court justice who served as the U.S. chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, who declared in his opening address there, “Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance.”

What’s not to love about a quote from Bob Jackson. He’d know what to do with the coup plotters.

See you in the funny papers or in court. The last word goes to Clarence Carter: