Today, November 25, 2024, may turn out to be one of the most consequential days in the history of American jurisprudence.

Special prosecutor Jack Smith has announced that he is dropping the prosecutions in both of his ongoing federal cases against President-elect Trump. That means the Florida-based confidential documents case, as well as the January 6 related charges in Washington, DC, are now dead.

We’ll leave it for another day to debate how solid those cases were, especially given that the Justice Department had declined to pursue the current president on comically identical charges, citing the previously unknown legal doctrine of “senility.” Leave aside also that the forum shopping required for the January 6 case found perhaps the only jurisdiction in America that didn’t consider orders given by the commander-in-chief to his cabinet “official actions.”

Also setting aside the serious question of whether his appointment was even legal, special prosecutor Jack Smith did the right thing in pulling the plug on these cases, and allowing the US to return to the serious business of blind justice and a legal system that stops targeting perceived political enemies.

An editor at the Arizona Republic, however, took precisely the opposite tack.

In the wake of the DOJ dropping its charges against Trump, the Republic’s editorial page Elvia Diaz has accused Trump of “making it clear he will weaponize the feds against political enemies.” In fact, Trump seems to have made no such promise.

Here’s what happened.

In response to the news that the two federal cases were being dropped, President-elect Trump wrote a message descrying the many cases that were brought against him just as he was gathering steam as a candidate against the current president. He also mentioned that several non-federal prosecutors, including those in Atlanta and Manhattan, as well as the New York State Attorney General, also cooked up criminal and civil cases against him.

He didn’t mention, but easily might have, the efforts by several states to kick him off the ballot. That maneuver was overturned by the Supreme Court 9-to-0, and looks particularly hostile to democracy given the results of the election earlier this month, which showed that American voters preferred the candidate that Democratic officials in Colorado and Maine tried to prevent from appearing on their states’ ballots.

Here’s the full text of what Trump wrote.

These cases, like all of the other cases I have been forced to go through, are empty and lawless, and should never have been brought. Over $100 Million Dollars of Taxpayer Dollars has been wasted in the Democrat Party’s fight against their Political Opponent, ME. Nothing like this has ever happened in our Country before. They have also used State Prosecutors and District Attorneys, such as Fani Willis and her lover, Nathan Wade (who had absolutely zero experience in cases such as this, but was paid MILLIONS, enough for them to take numerous trips and cruises around the globe!), Letitia James, who inappropriately, unethically, and probably illegally, campaigned on “GETTING TRUMP” in order to win Political Office, and Alvin Bragg, who himself never wanted to bring this case against me, but was forced to do so by the Justice Department and the Democrat Party. It was a political hijacking, and a low point in the History of our Country that such a thing could have happened, and yet, I persevered, against all odds, and WON. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Trump’s message contains no allusion to trying to “weaponize the feds against political enemies.” In fact, it decries his political opponents for having done precisely that.

The Arizona Globe has reached out to Ms. Diaz, both on X and via email, and will include her response if she provides one.

It’s hard to understand how the mainstream media—including the state’s dominant newspaper—have concluded from Trump’s convincing win that the best course forward is the 2016 playbook: oppose Trump at every step and interpret his every utterance as a threat to democracy. But this one’s not even a close call. This doesn’t seem to be an uncharitable interpretation of a Trump remark. It’s the editorial page editor of the state’s biggest newspaper straight-up accusing him of saying something he didn’t say.

Perhaps that explains not only Trump’s win, in the face of four prosecutions and a bunch of lawsuits, but also the struggles many mainstream news outlets are having in assuring readers that they care about getting the story right.