Show-Me State Times

Missouri Attorney General candidate Will Scharf recently tweeted that the June 14 indictment of former President Donald Trump is “outrageous and shocking.”

Scharf is a former assistant U.S. attorney who worked on two different Supreme Court confirmations and was a clerk for two federal appellate judges.

Trump was indicted earlier this month by a federal grand jury, the Wall Street Journal reported. The indictment was over his handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. This is the first federal indictment of a former president in U.S. history, the Wall Street Journal reported. He has been charged with seven counts total, including violations related to the Espionage Act, dealing with misuse of classified information and the obstruction of false statements. 

Scharf’s six comments were on “interplay between the Espionage Act and the Presidential Records Act,” where he said the definitions of personal and presidential documents would play a huge role in the case, especially regarding how Trump viewed the documents in question.

In “Classification and National Defense Information,” he pointed out the various levels of classification, not all of which are considered National Defense Information.

Scharf's posts on “Walt Nauta and DOJ Misconduct” and “Attorney Client Privilege” examined potential failures of the following protocols in the case.

Scharf also discussed the timing of the indictment.

“They know that Trump is the leading candidate for president,” he said. “They know he’s beating Biden in the polls. They must know how bad it looks for a sitting president’s DOJ to indict that president’s primary political opponent.

“It’s not the way things are supposed to work, and the fact that our law enforcement and intelligence apparatuses are being weaponized in this way against a leading presidential contender is truly a black mark on them and on our republic,” Scharf added.

On the choice of attorney Jack Smith as special counsel on the case, Scharf brought up a previous case where “Using a very aggressive interpretation of the scope of federal bribery and honest services fraud statutes, Smith nuked the career and life of a popular Republican politician, before having all his convictions overturned by the Supreme Court in a 9-0 opinion.”

“You read that right,” Scharf said. “All nine Supreme Court justices smacked Jack Smith down for an overzealous, legally defective prosecution of a Republican politician. SCOTUS gutted him so badly that DOJ didn’t even try to retry the case. They just dropped it.

“Like the timing, the decision just reeks of politics,” Scharf concluded.