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House Republican Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan came under fire by a former top U.S. Dept. of Justice official after rushing to defend Donald Trump from his latest indictment.

Since Monday night when the Fulton County, Georgia grand jury handed up a sprawling 98-page speaking indictment against the ex-president and 18 of his supporters, some Republicans have been pointing to small, selected small portions of the document and claiming that District Attorney Fani Willis is suggesting the acts listed are all illegal.

House Republican Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan came under fire by a former top U.S. Dept. of Justice official after rushing to defend Donald Trump from his latest indictment.

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Since Monday night when the Fulton County, Georgia grand jury handed up a sprawling 98-page speaking indictment against the ex-president and 18 of his supporters, some Republicans have been pointing to small, selected small portions of the document and claiming that District Attorney Fani Willis is suggesting the acts listed are all illegal.

Jordan on Tuesday posted one such claim.

“Mark Meadows asked for a phone number,” he began, adding that former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis “gave legal advice. But somehow the Fulton County DA thinks this is a vast criminal conspiracy? Totally ridiculous.”

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“Maybe the DA should focus on the REAL crime, murders, and corruption happening in her county every day!” Jordan insisted.

Attorney Michael Bromwich is a former U.S. Dept. of Justice Inspector General who lead several notable probes into the FBI’s investigations, and lead former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s legal team.

Thursday afternoon he slammed Jordan’s remarks.

“It’s truly scandalous that the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee doesn’t understand the basics of conspiracy law,” Bromwich said. “Overt acts in furtherance of a conspiracy don’t themselves have to be crimes.”

Bromwich was not the first to criticize Jordan’s remarks.

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“Oh hi @Jim_Jordan, wanted to let you know that driving is illegal; if you are the getaway driver for a bank robbery,” snarked U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA), a former JAG attorney.

“Lighting a match is illegal; if you do it to set fire to a church,” Congressman Lieu continued. “Buying fertilizer is illegal; if you plan to give it to a terrorist to make a bomb. Get it?”

Referring to the domestic terrorist known as the “Unabomber,” Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast responded to Jordan’s comment by saying, “This is like saying ted kaczynski was jailed for using the United States postal service.”

Appearing to point to widespread accusations that Congressman Jordan ignored or disregarded numerous reports of sexual misconduct or sexual assault when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, historian Kevin Kruse said: “Jim Jordan can’t see the crimes? Huh, that’s new.”

Before he became The Big Apple's mayor, Rudy Giuliani built a reputation as a formidable United States attorney in the Southern District of New York by using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act of 1970 to prosecute organized crime leaders. On Wednesday, Slate Magazine's Fred Kaplan discusses Giuliani's fall from grace after he was indicted along with former President Donald Trump and seventeen others by Fulton County, Georga District Attorney Fani Willis under that same law for allegedly conspiring to steal the 2020 election.

"Irony is too mild a tag to capture the predicament in which this man finds himself. Shameful and appalling are other words that come quickly to mind. Another term—more apt still after a moment’s reflection—is bewildering," Kaplan writes. "Giuliani didn't merely cite RICO statutes to take down many criminals; he practically invented the art of doing so."

Kaplan recalls, "Giuliani and his team were the first prosecutors to figure out how to do this, in a systematic way, in a major felony case—and it was precisely the sort of case that the statute's drafters had in mind. In the Mafia Commission trial, which lasted from February 1985 until November 1986, the Southern District indicted 11 Mafia figures, including leaders from all of the 'five families,' who controlled myriad businesses and municipal services across New York City. Convicted of charges including extortion, labor racketeering, and murder for hire, the leaders were sentenced to between 70 and 100 years in prison."

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

Giuliani then "went after white-collar criminals in the financial world, indicting Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, whose insider trading practices were breathtakingly brazen—and lucrative," Kaplan continues, noting, "The trials of the five families and the Wall Street insiders put Giuliani on the map. He ran for mayor, winning on his second bid in 1993, on the basis of his success as a crime-fighting crusader. The trials also legitimized RICO as a powerful prosecutorial tool against criminals who couldn't easily be nabbed for their individual acts. (It is significant that Al Capone, the most notorious mobster in pre-RICO days, was indicted and prosecuted on the relatively minor charge of income tax evasion)."

Given Giuliani's expertise, Kaplan posits, "How did he fall into this trap?"

Kaplan says that "the Rudy Giuliani of the Trump era is very different from the Rudy Giuliani of the 1980s and '90s," when he was a "liberal Republican back in the days when there were such creatures." After Giuliani guided the country through the trauma of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, he "plotted a course to the White House and was considered a more than plausible candidate. But he flamed out" because "he was too liberal for the party's base." At that point, "he faced a choice: get out of national Republican politics or tack hard to the right. He chose the latter," says Kaplan.

Following his recruitment as "one of Trump's most fiercely growling attack dogs in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton," Kaplan adds, Giuliani "also became rich, racking up high fees as a consultant and keynote speaker."

Through his "arrogant defensiveness" and "insatiable desire for wealth and power," Kaplan concludes, "Giuliani lost sight of many things from his past—his political values, his personal tastes, and, it seems, his deep understanding that if you hang around with corrupt people, helping them do corrupt things, you can get hammered by his old friend, RICO."

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Kaplan's analysis is available at this link.

All over the United States, Republicans in state legislatures have been pushing voter suppression bills that are designed to make it more difficult to vote. African-Americans are a major target of the bills, which President Joe Biden and other Democrats are comparing to segregationist Jim Crow laws of the past. And Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson, a far-right Republican, has another demographic he would like to keep away from the polls: college students.

During a March 26 interview with Mississippi's WLOX-TV, Watson railed against Biden's March 6 executive order on voting access as well the For the People Act — a Democrat-sponsored voting rights bill that was recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives but now faces an uphill climb in the U.S. Senate, where Democrats have a narrow majority. Republicans have often expressed worries about Millennials voting Democrat, and Watson is obviously worried about members of Generation Z rejecting Republicans if more of them are registered to vote.

Watson told WLOX, "So think about all those woke college and university students now who will automatically be registered to vote whether they wanted to or not. Again, if they didn't know to opt-out, they're going to be automatically registered to vote — and then, they receive this mail-in ballot that they probably didn't know was coming because they didn't know they were registered to vote."

Biden's executive order of March 6, however, says nothing about automatic voter registration, and it does not mention college students. But that didn't stop Watson from turning college students into the boogeyman, especially if they are what he considers "woke."

In right-wing media, the term "woke" is often used as an epithet to mean extreme political correctness and "cancel culture." Some liberals have, at times, been critical of "woke" culture as well, including "Real Time" host Bill Maher — who has said that he makes a distinction between "woke" and liberal. But when Maher uses the term "woke" in a critical way, he has very different motivations from someone on the far right such as Watson.

Former Mississippi Gov. Ray Mabus, a Democrat served as secretary of the U.S. Navy under President Barack Obama, has been highly critical of Watson's comments — tweeting, "His talking points are from (the) 1950s. Slightly updated. Literacy tests anyone?"

Watson's stand against college students voting is a departure from what he said in the past. When he was running for secretary of state in 2019, Watson said he wanted to make it "easier" for college students to vote and was open to having on-campus polling places.

On March 22, lawyers representing far-right attorney Sidney Powell asked a federal judge to dismiss Dominion Voting Systems' defamation lawsuit against her. Conservative law professor Kimberly Wehle, in an article published by The Bulwark on March 25, lays out some of the major flaws in Powell's defense.

After the 2020 presidential election, Powell was among the attorneys who filed lawsuits promoting then-President Donald Trump's bogus, totally debunked claims of widespread voter fraud — and she had a lot to say about Dominion, claiming that its voting technology was used to help now-President Joe Biden steal the election just as it was used to help the late leftist President Hugo Chávez steal votes in Venezuela. It wasn't hard for Dominion to debunk Powell's claim, as Dominion's equipment had never even been used in that South American country.

Now, Powell's defense in the defamation lawsuit is that her claims after the 2020 election couldn't possibly have been taken seriously.

"Powell seeks to have it both ways," explains Wehle, who teaches at the University of Baltimore law school and is a former assistant U.S. attorney. "Through her lawyers, she claims, on one hand, that she based her allegations on facts. On the other, she asserts that no reasonable person would believe that her claims were facts. Powell's word salad of tortured logic and self-contradiction will fool no one."

Wehle goes on to point out that some media figures — including MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Fox News' Tucker Carlson — have "rebutted defamation charges by arguing that not everything they say on air can be construed as verifiably true."

"Powell's case is a bit different," Wehle observes. "She did not speak as a news anchor or pundit, but as a lawyer who was acting in the capacity of a lawyer — and thus, bound by a slew of ethical obligations of candor and accuracy that accompany a license to practice law. For starters, she cannot make insupportable factual representations to a court without running afoul of sanctions rules."

Wehle points out that in a defamation lawsuit, the plaintiff must "prove that the defendant acted with actual malice."

The law professor observes, "In her papers, Powell argues that her feeding of the Big Lie wasn't actually defamatory, and that the complaint should therefore be dismissed outright, without any investigation into the facts underlying her statements…. Powell also waves around the 1st Amendment to justify dismissal of Dominion's case, but that argument may be overblown, as defamation claims aren't per se unconstitutional. The question is whether Powell's statements were actionable as a matter of law."

Powell's attorneys, in her defense against Dominion, argue that "reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact but view them only as claims that await testing by the courts through the adversary process." And Powell's team compares her to both the U.S. Department of Justice and the NAACP, arguing that "making public announcements as to the status of cases that affect the public interest is an accepted and time-honored means of keeping the public advised about litigation that may have a profound effect on their lives."

"Of course," Wehle writes, "Powell's false assertions that Dominion was created in Venezuela to rig elections at the behest of a deceased dictator, Hugo Chávez, and that the company bribed Georgia officials for a no-bid contract, were hardly in the public interest. To compare her to DOJ and the NAACP makes a mockery of the rule of law and the judicial system."