Why Jack Smith charged Trump using Reconstruction-era laws passed against KKK: columnist

In a Monday, January 15 op-ed for The Guardian, columnist Sidney Blumenthal highlights why special counsel Jack Smith indicted former President Donald Trump under the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Acts of 1870 and 1871, "which incorporates the 14th amendment, section 3, of the constitution," for "clear and compelling reasons." He adds the reasons are included in the indictments and court rulings.

The Guardian columnist notes, "The KKK Act was Congress's attempt to stamp out the Klan's domestic terrorism. It criminalized using 'force, bribery, threats, intimidation, or other unlawful means' to interfere with any citizen’s right and ability to vote."

According to Blumenthal, "Trump has been charged on the same grounds that Klansmen were prosecuted, not only during Reconstruction but also during the civil rights era of the 1960s, and he has been removed from the ballot on the same basis as Confederate traitors were removed from elective office.

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Now, the Guardian columnist emphasizes, "The Trump trials have put the civil war and Reconstruction amendments on trial again – 'the results of the war', as [US President Ulysses S.] Grant called it," adding, "Trump's indictment under section 241 of the KKK Act tests the federal government's ability and willingness to secure basic voting rights and defend the constitution. Or else there will be 'bedlam.'"

Furthermore, he writes, "It is precisely under section 241 of the Ku Klux Klan Act, upheld by the supreme court in an opinion that establishes the broadest possible application, that the justice department indicted Donald Trump on 1 August 2023. The indictment was not restricted to Trump’s activities during the January 6 US Capitol riot, but to the period of his conspiracy to stage a coup, a span that began after the election to the day he left office."

Blumenthal emphasizes:

The 14th amendment, section 3, provides a disqualification for insurrectionists. It was a self-executing document, just as was the 13th amendment abolishing slavery. The Congress enacted a series of enforcement acts – the first and second Reconstruction Acts, and the first Civil Rights Act. As President Grant and the Congress stated in the crisis over Georgia in 1869, the only means to remove the 'disability' of disqualification was by an act of the Congress as stipulated in section 3 – an amnesty. The very existence of a remedy providing for the removal of the disqualification implies that the law is self-executing, as Grant and the Congress understood.

The Ku Klux Klan Act, which specifically included section 3, was a further instrument to deal with a new insurrection. During Reconstruction that section was used within the KKK Act to suppress precisely that insurrection. Grant and the Congress knew that the 14th amendment was not limited to the insurrection that forced the civil war, but also was a governing constitutional document applicable to future insurrections.

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Blumenthal's full op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).