Conspiracy theorist Julie Kelly claims the unsealed Trump filing is “criminalizing any political activity by a president in the White House”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the October 3, 2024, edition of Real America’s Voice’s War Room  

JULIE KELLY (GUEST):  Look, Jack Smith knows this case is going nowhere, and let's remember what this new indictment, superseding indictment is. It is a four-count indictment. Three conspiracy charges, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., conspiracy to deny rights, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy to obstruct.

…

So this is what is mostly in his new dossier, his motion that was unsealed yesterday, trying to explain how what Donald Trump did in office was purely private and political, that what his communications with Mike Pence were political and private, not in his official capacity as president.

What this represents, and because they only see this through the lens of Donald Trump, if they get their way, which they won't, is criminalizing any political activity by a president in the White House.

DAVE BRAT (GUEST HOST): Right. Right.

KELLY: That's what this would be. So this is why it's a folly, Dave. That's why it's not going anywhere. Jack Smith knows it. Tanya Chutkan knows it. Everyone knows it. This is a purely political, partisan move. The press is eating it up. And at the end of the day, this will all go away in the higher courts, whether appellate, certainly the Supreme Court. But it doesn't matter because they're gonna get their headlines. The fake ones we saw last night and today that Donald Trump called for a riot is not what that document says.

As Media Matters has documented:

Kelly has a long history of promoting unhinged conspiracy theories and election denial, including baseless accusations smearing police officers who were attacked on January 6, 2021.

  • Kelly accused former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a heart attack after a rioter attacked him with a stun gun, of instead being a “crisis actor.”

  • Kelly has falsely claimed that a majority of Americans “don't think that Joe Biden legitimately won the election in 2020,” and that investigations of January 6 are a means to “silence political dissent.”

  • Kelly claimed that the left would “round up every single American who voted for Donald Trump” if they could.

  • Kelly has accused the FBI of secretly being behind the explosives left near the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters the night before January 6, 2021, which she called “this pipe bomb hoax,” further adding, “It doesn't defy reality to think that this agency was deeply involved in creating all of these narratives about January 6.”

  • During her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2022, Kelly accused President Joe Biden of presiding over a dictatorial regime and acting worse than Russian President Vladimir Putin in the prosecution of January 6 defendants.

  • In an interview with former Trump adviser and January 6 provocateur Steve Bannon, Kelly claimed: “January 6, 2021, was probably the biggest instance of police brutality that this country has seen since the Civil Rights Movement.”

  • During the same interview, Kelly suggested that police officers who took their own lives after serving at the Capitol on January 6 did so out of shame at the violence committed against Trump supporters: