NEW: Senior Aide to Jack Smith Met With White House Counsel's Office Just Weeks Before Trump Indictment
NEW: Senior Aide to Jack Smith Met With White House Counsel's Office Just Weeks Before Trump Indictment
Article by Jennifer Van Laar in RedState
The double standard as to what constitutes election interference or politically-motivated prosecutions has never been more glaring. While Democrats will never admit it, anyone with normal cognitive function understands that the indictments against Donald Trump are all politically motivated, and there certainly appears to be coordination between the prosecutors. The indictments started coming well into Trump's third presidential campaign, and prosecutors are asking that Trump stand trial throughout the election season.
On the flip side of the coin, U.S. Attorney David Weiss refused to allow any investigation into a presidential candidate's son within months of any election dates, and Hunter Biden's attorneys were successful in getting the sweetest of all plea deals for him by simply saying that the prosecution looked to be political.
Now we're learning that the interference is reaching a much higher level. The New York Post is reporting that one of the lead prosecutors in the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith held meetings in the White House, with the White House Counsel's office, just weeks before Smith's first indictment of Trump was announced.
Jay Bratt, who joined the special counsel team in November 2022, shortly after it was formed, took a meeting in the White House on March 31, 2023, with Caroline Saba, deputy chief of staff for the White House counsel’s office, White House visitor logs show.
They were joined in the 10 a.m. meeting by Danielle Ray, an FBI agent in the Washington field office.
Bratt, 63, also met with Saba at the White House in November 2021, when Trump was mired in negotiations with the National Archives, who were demanding the return of presidential records from his Mar-a-Lago estate before a formal investigation had not yet been opened.
Bratt had a third meeting in the White House in September 2021, this time with Katherine Reily, an advisor to the White House chief of staff’s office.
The logs offer no information about what was discussed at the meetings.
The FBI declined to comment, and the Special Counsel's spokesman said Bratt was there for a "case-related interview."
The Post further reported:
A person with knowledge of the 2023 visit insisted that it was “an interview of a career official who was also working at the White House during the Trump Administration.”
The same individual said the 2021 visits were “national security related.”
Bratt isn't just some garden-variety part of this saga, either. Prior to joining Smith's team, Bratt was chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section at the DOJ and in that capacity, he "played a central role in the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified national-security material" at his home in Florida. Bratt was one of the participants in a June 2022 Mar-a-Lago visit, where he "inspected storage facilities at the property and personally interacted with Trump." According to a Washington Post exclusive, Bratt was the force behind the unannounced FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, bullying FBI officials in Washington and angrily dismissing their concerns that going about it Bratt's way could lead to problems in any future prosecution. Those FBI officials wanted to instead go through Trump's attorneys to have a consensual search performed and eventually Bratt went over their heads to get his way.
Bratt was also one of the DOJ officials who argued against unsealing the affidavit used to justify the issuance of a search warrant for Trump's home.
Most importantly, Bratt is the person accused of malfeasance, regarding his interactions with Trump valet Walt Nauta's attorney, Stanley Woodward. Around November 2022 Bratt basically told Woodward, "We believe your guy gave conflicting statements, and he could be charged with false statements, but he could always cooperate and testify against Trump," then threatened that Woodward's application for a federal judgeship would be doomed if Woodward couldn't get Nauta to flip.
Nauta had already spoken to prosecutors in the investigation when they called his lawyer Stanley Woodward and summoned him to a meeting at justice department headquarters for an urgent matter that they were reluctant to discuss over the phone, the letter said.
When Woodward arrived at the conference room, he was seated across from several prosecutors working on the investigation, including the chief of the counterintelligence section, Jay Bratt, who explained that they wanted Nauta to cooperate with the government against Trump, the letter said.
Nauta should cooperate with the government because he had given potentially conflicting testimony that could result in a false statements charge, the prosecutors said according to the letter. Woodward is said to have demurred, disputing that Nauta had made false statements.
Bratt then turned to Woodward and remarked that he did not think that Woodward was a “Trump guy” and that “he would do the right thing”, before noting that he knew Woodward had submitted an application to be a judge at the superior court in Washington DC that was currently pending, the letter said.
The allegation, in essence, is that Bratt suggested Woodward’s judicial application might be considered more favorably if he and his client cooperated against Trump.
In light of those incidents, Bratt's March 2023 White House meeting is especially suspect.
Legal experts the Post spoke to about the propriety of the meeting agreed.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said the March meeting was particularly troublesome and “raises obvious concerns about visits to the White House after [Bratt] began his work with the special counsel.”
“There is no reason why the Justice Department should not be able to confirm whether this meeting was related to the ongoing investigation or concerns some other matter,” he said.
It's quite possible that the Justice Department doesn't want to confirm what the meeting was about because that could lead to additional questions neither the DOJ nor the White House want to answer.
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