After DOJ wins key ruling, grand jury witnesses begin testifying in Donald Trump probe

| 3:46 pm EDT October 14, 2022
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Months ago, the DOJ reportedly had Mike Pence’s senior staffers including Marc Short testify to a grand jury about January 6th. While never explicitly stated in the reporting, it was obvious that this testimony was against Donald Trump – particularly once Trump tried to invoke executive privilege to limit the scope of that testimony.

But now a federal judge has ruled that witnesses like Short must indeed give full testimony. And because the U.S. Court of Appeals refused to issue a stay while hearing Trump’s appeal, the Washington Post says that Short went ahead and testified to the grand jury yesterday. It also says that in light of the Short ruling, other witnesses in the same executive privilege situation are also now on track to testify.

Keep in mind that the delay here was on the part of the court system, and not the DOJ. Now that the DOJ has won, it’s acted quickly enough to make Trump’s appeal irrelevant, and gotten the testimony it’s long been trying to pin down. If the DOJ has been waiting for the testimony of Short and other key witnesses before indicting Trump for crimes related to January 6th and the attempted overthrow of the election, it now appears to have what it’s been waiting for.

It’s still anyone’s guess as to precisely when the DOJ will criminally indict Donald Trump, and whether the various charges he’s facing will come all at once or staggered. But the upshot is that this grand jury testimony from Team Pence means the DOJ has cleared yet another hurdle in a long series of legal system hurdles that it’s been forced to jump through as part of the complex process of indicting Trump.