Here’s the thing about the supposed meeting this week between the DOJ and Donald Trump’s lawyers
Yesterday multiple major news outlets reported that Jack Smith’s grand jury in the Trump classified documents case will be meeting this week for the first time in weeks. Given the secrecy, nothing can be interpreted as a sure thing. But the clear implication seems to be that Smith is bringing back the grand jury in order to have it criminally indict Donald Trump.
Like clockwork, CBS News reported today that Trump’s lawyers “could” meet with unnamed “Justice Department officials” this week to discuss the case. But this reporting just doesn’t sound right, and there are a few things worth keeping in mind here.
First, Trump’s lawyers already publicly asked Attorney General Merrick Garland for a meeting a week or two ago, and he publicly said “no.” So if such a meeting is happening, it would be with Jack Smith and his team. Given the timing and circumstances, such a meeting could only be for the purpose of Smith informing Trump’s attorneys that he’s being indicted.
But even the existence of this “meeting” can’t be taken as a given, because of the second thing you have to keep in mind. If this leak about a meeting didn’t come from Jack Smith (and why would it?), then it had to have come from Trump’s own legal team – and given their track record they are not a reliable source for anything.
In other words, this “meeting” may not even exist. Trump’s lawyers know there’s nothing they can do to stop him from being indicted (or for that matter convicted). And given the grand jury news, they surely expect that the indictment could come this week. This leak about a “meeting” could simply be Trump’s lawyers’ way of trying to convince Trump that they’re “doing something.” Trump sees the headlines that his team is supposedly meeting with the DOJ, figures they still have some kind of plan to save him, and doesn’t immediately fire them.
We’ll still see a metric ton of fretting and raging about how this supposedly means Garland is meeting with Trump’s lawyers to sabotage Smith and get Trump off the hook. But this stuff is hallucinatory at this point – merely a result of the media’s endless fictional ratings-driven outrage-inducing narratives casting Garland as somehow simultaneously being a nonfunctioning coward and a scheming villain.
In any case, I wouldn’t put a ton of stock (or necessarily any stock) in this new reporting about this supposed “meeting.” If there is a meeting, it’s probably a “your client is being indicted” meeting – which would be great, except that we can’t even assume there really is a meeting pending.
Welcome to the maddening world of trying to figure out where the media is getting doesn’t-sound-right inside information from, who’s feeding it to them, and what might be really going on instead. But given how quickly this all seems to be unfolding, we should start getting a more reliable version of the story – and even the Trump indictment itself – rather soon.
