If election denialism is a crime, why weren't Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams, and John Lewis prosecuted for it?

I will accept the legitimacy of Jack Smith's Trump probe if it also includes prosecution of those who plotted to overturn Mr. Trump's fair election via the Steele Dossier and Russia collusion hoax.

On Wednesday, August 2, Jack Smith charged former President Donald J. Trump with the crime of exercising his first amendment right to wrong speech. Smith did not charge Trump with incitement to riot. His entire case rests on the faulty presumption that Trump knew that the 2020 U.S. Presidential election was not “stolen,” but encouraged his supporters to protest as if it was. Good luck with that, Jack.

There are many other problems with Smith’s clear overreach. Trump repeatedly––to friends, colleagues, media, supporters––repeated the same claim over and over: the 2020 election was stolen from him. Trump had good reason to be suspicious of what the shady Democrats were up to. Dems had already been exposed for trucking in the Trump/Russia collusion hoax, for which the ringleaders have still escaped punishment, despite that Big Lie’s enormous material damage to Trump’s presidency, to goodwill among families, and to the republic. Trump was also right to be worried about the Democrats’ rampant overturning of state election procedures without state legislative approval, their deployment of questionable practices like ballot harvesting, and their unilateral dissemination of mass mail-in ballots. Given these and other “irregularities,” the 2020 election was by no means “clean.” It was made doubly unclean by candidate Biden’s repeated lies that he knew nothing about his son Hunter’s overseas pay-to-play schemes and that Hunter’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” In fact, in knowing disregard of the truth, Biden aides coordinated with a series of pro-Biden intel operatives to craft a deceitful letter, akin to the Steele Dossier lie, claiming that the mere existence of Hunter’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” None of these traitors seem to warrant scrutiny by Merrick Garland, let alone Jack Smith. Had Huntergate been openly disclosed, instead of censored by pro-Biden social media and media, Trump might have won. Over 20% of 2020 Biden voters said they would not have voted for Biden had the truth of his and his son’s overseas corruption been allowed to come to light.

When someone like Trump, conspiratorial by nature, ingests all that evil, you can understand his conjecture that the Democrats would try, by hook or by crook, to steal the 2020 election. And he has every right as an American to seek redress from his government for such a perceived injustice, even though on this front Trump was technically wrong. Biden won. Trump lost primarily due to his first debate performance in which he vociferously tried to raise the above claims, which have all since been verified.

So, Jack Smith is chasing his tail here and misreading what the Supreme Court has actually ruled, as of May of this year, on what is factually meant by conspiracy and obstruction. Trump had a right to be suspicious of the 2020 election. He had a constitutional right to protest the 2020 election procedures and results. And he asked his supporters to protest peaceably.

But the bigger problem for Smith, as it is with almost every single indictment brought by Democratic prosecutors against Trump, is his hypocritical and selective double standard. For example, by the standard Smith is deploying in the Trump case, Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats should have been prosecuted for denying the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and for claiming that Trump won because of “collusion with Russia.” Mrs. Clinton and her sundry allies made this false claim of "illegality" all over the media. Her backers in the Democratic Party launched costly and damaging investigations based on this lie and consciously tied up Mr. Trump's first term because of it.

To this day, Mrs. Clinton and her surrogates make these claims in one form or another, but there's no Jack Smith looking into their behavior let alone that of Marc Elias, James Clapper, John Brennan, and all those who profited from their election denialism. Seventy congressional Democrats in 2017 rejected the "legitimacy" of Trump's triumph and several of those seditionists refused to attend his inauguration, including the holiest of holies the late Rep. John Lewis, all because they believed Trump was an "illegitimate" President. Many voted to not certify the results. There has been no prosecution of Democrats for those treasonous actions. Ditto for Democrat Stacy Abrams, who openly denied the results of the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election.

Trump's election denialism was wrong, but his questioning of the Dems' unilateral upending of election procedures was not. If we are going to prosecute Trump's election denialism, we need to prosecute the Dems' election denialism, the effects of which were also dire.

I am happy to accept the legitimacy of Jack Smith's Trump probe if it also includes the prosecution of the election deniers who plotted to overturn Mr. Trump's free and fair election via the Steele Dossier and concomitant Russia collusion hoax. Otherwise, I am inclined to classify all such denialism as free speech, even if the indirect effects of this speech are not pretty.