Georgia criminal case against Donald Trump goes to grand jury
Because the Manhattan District Attorney has had such a head start, one might have expected New York to criminally indict Donald Trump on financial charges before Georgia can get around to indicting Trump on election fraud. But new reporting tonight calls the timing into question.
The Fulton County District Attorney in Georgia is putting her criminal case against Trump in front of a grand jury this week, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper. The article goes on to speculate about the potential timetable, but the reality is that we don’t know how long the grand jury process will take. That’s up to the DA, the kinds of charges she decides to seek, and the complexity of the case she decides to put in front of the grand jury.
Here’s the thing, though. Grand juries nearly always give prosecutors the indictments they ask for, and there’s a reason for that: prosecutors rarely take a case to a grand jury unless they know they have more than enough evidence to get an indictment. So this means that Donald Trump will very probably end up being indicted in Georgia, arrested, and put on criminal trial.
This will also mean that the District Attorneys in Georgia and New York will both have criminal cases against Trump in front of grand juries at the same time. It raises questions about whether one might try to indict Trump before the other, who would get to put Trump on trial first, and so on. It also raises questions about whether the Manhattan DA might decide to speed up his timetable to indict and arrest Trump before the Fulton County DA can. All we know for sure is that Trump is in a world of legal trouble, and it’s only getting worse.
