'John Brennan's days as a free man are numbered': CPAC speaker

President Donald Trump was likely pleased with the statements made by three of America’s premiere conservative thinkers at a Thursday evening panel at CPAC. Even as they denounced so-called persecution of Republicans under Democratic presidents, all three of them — including a Trump administration official —called for former special counsel Jack Smith and former CIA Director John Brennan to be arrested for doing their jobs in ways Trump disliked.

"Jack Smith is very familiar with 18 USC Section 241, Conspiracy Against Rights,” attorney Mike Davis, founder and president of the far right Article III Project, said to the moderator and TV host Ben Ferguson and Trump’s US special envoy to Belarus, John Coale. “It's one of the bogus charges he brought against President Trump for the non-crime of objecting to a presidential election, which is allowed by the First Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887.”

The three men proceeded to incorrectly claim that President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden ”politicized and weaponized intel agencies and law enforcement” to go after him, even though their investigations into Trump’s ties to the Russian government were proved to be sound by special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. “That is textbook Conspiracy Against Rights under 18 USC Section 241, a very serious federal civil rights felony. And this is ongoing because it's an ongoing conspiracy, so they're not going to be able to hide from the statute of limitations."

Davis later laid into Brennan, who Trump has falsely accused of perjuring himself for not going along with the MAGA narrative about Trump’s subsequently-proven collaboration with the Russian government.

"I would say to people like John Brennan: your days as a free man may be numbered,” Davis said. “I think there's pretty good evidence that John Brennan perjured himself, and I think it's pretty slam dunk. We just saw that the House Intel Committee released the transcripts on this. Like I said, I think John Brennan's days as a free man are numbered."

Even though Davis’ organization and the entire panel in theory oppose “lawfare,” or the practice of using bogus legal cases to target one’s political enemies, Ferguson argued an exception could be made in the case of Trump’s enemies because what they did “has nothing to do with politics. It has to do with right and wrong”

Near the end of the conversation Coale also admitted that, when trying to discuss the Constitution with Trump at one point, the president spurted out, "What the F— is the Eighth Amendment?" The audience laughed as the panelists and crowd seemed to agree that the story seemed characteristic of Trump.

The Eighth Amendment says, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Brennan is currently fighting to not have his case presided over by U. S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who Trump appointed in 2020 and who has been accused of misusing her power to make politically-motivated rulings in Trump’s favor. Attorney Kenneth L. Wainstein, who is representing Brennan, pointed out that Trump had managed to "manipulate grand jury and case assignment procedures" to guarantee Brennan’s case was tried by Cannon, as she is notorious for her pro-Trump rulings.

"[W]ere we in a normal time, we might hesitate to question the propriety of the government's actions in the grand jury process. However, we are no longer in a normal time," Wainstein wrote. "We are now in a time when the Justice Department has surrendered much of its independence and the President is directly commanding his Attorney General and her leadership team to use their prosecutorial authorities against his perceived political adversaries."

Smith, whose prosecuted Trump for allegedly improperly taking classified documents from the White House, had his own case destroyed by Cannon’s unbroken string of pro-Trump rulings. Despite the CPAC panelists claiming that Smith was discredited, a recent report revealed Smith determined Trump had retained "secret documents that related to his worldwide business interests," potentially revealing that he planned to profit from nationally classified information by retaining them illegally.

“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them,” the memo explained. “We must have those documents.”