Who’s next?
When the House announced yesterday that the Sergeant-at-Arms had received a grand jury subpoena for documents from the Department of Justice, it sure seemed like it meant Jack Smith was expanding his probe to target Congress. Subsequent media reports suggested that this was instead a matter of the DOJ investigating one unnamed House member for alleged financial shenanigans. The odd manner in which the House announced the subpoena suggests that there may be more going on. We’ll see. But the whole thing was a good reminder of two important things.
First, we don’t know what all may be going on in the Jack Smith probe. It’s entirely possible that he still has an active grand jury sending new subpoenas and such. The recent lack of headlines on that front doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been happening. It just means that if anything has been going on, it hasn’t spilled over into public view. Smith’s work is secret by default.
Second, if this is indeed a DOJ criminal probe into a House member’s finances, then it got this far in secret before it spilled over into public. And we still don’t even know who the target is. It’s a good reminder that we don’t know who in politics is, or is not, under criminal investigation. The Feds don’t advertise these things.
Remember when the DOJ indicted George Santos? There hadn’t been any reporting on that probe up to that point. But that case wasn’t thrown together the night before the indictment. It had been playing out behind the scenes for a long time. Until an indictment comes down, or until someone blabs about a subpoena, we really don’t know who all in politics may be under federal investigation. A lack of recent headlines about an investigation doesn’t necessarily mean that this or that person has “gotten away” with this or that thing.
