About those “imminent” Trump criminal indictments…
Fulton County DA Fani Willis told a judge the better part of three weeks ago that indictments in her Donald Trump criminal case were “imminent.” Since these indictments haven’t yet happened, the whole thing now seems to be setting off some panicking and fretting across social media.
It’s important to keep in mind that the word “imminent” has different contexts. If a waiter said the arrival of your food is imminent, you’d expect it within a few minutes. There are other scenarios where you’d take “imminent” to mean a few hours, or a few days. But here we’re talking about the legal system, where things generally move at a glacial pace compared to all other aspects of life, and “imminent” could easily mean three weeks or a month.
Let’s also keep in mind that the DA isn’t sitting with her feet up doing nothing. Even if she decided to indict Trump the minute the special grand jury issued its report, she’d still have to turn around and put that report in front of a regular grand jury so it can issue the indictments. And that in turn is dependent upon how quickly a regular grand jury became available to her. After all, the reason she requested a special grand jury to begin with was that she felt her access to regular grand juries was taking too long.
All that said, it feels like we’re nearing the end of what “imminent” could mean – even within the slow context of the legal system. But that’s not reason for concern. There is nothing wrong with the case or the process; that’s not how anything works. Instead, this is a time for excitement. Trump is about to be indicted. Sitting around and inventing reasons to panic and fret is… not helpful. Nor is your impatience relevant to the pace at which the legal process moves. The only relevant point here is that Fulton County is about to criminally indict Donald Trump. For all we know it could happen on Monday.
