Here comes Fani Willis’ grand jury

| 9:09 am EDT July 10, 2023
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Multiple local news outlets in Georgia are now reporting that this week Fulton County will seat the grand jury that DA Fani Willis will use to bring indictments in her 2020 election criminal probe into Donald Trump and his associates. This after Willis long ago asked the courts to keep their calendars clear for the second week of August. So if this information holds, it looks like Willis is indeed on track to bring indictments in that timeframe. But there are still a lot of questions.

For instance, while Fani Willis’ election-related probe and Jack Smith’s election-related probe go into some different areas, they have significant overlap. In such instances, federal and state prosecutors typically coordinate their timing in order to make sure nothing interferes with anything. It’s also customary, but not absolute, that the Feds indict first in these instances. So does this mean Smith is planning to indict before Willis? If Willis is aiming for the second week of August, then what is Smith aiming for? Perhaps the third or fourth week of July? That’s just a guess; you’d have to ask Smith.

There’s also the question of whether Fani Willis has been waiting for Jack Smith to bring his indictments because hers are based on his. It’s been widely reported that Smith is investigating Trump for wire fraud – and Willis could use such federal charges as a pretext for bringing state RICO charges. There have been multiple media reports about Willis considering RICO charges against Trump, but we still have yet to get a definitive answer about this.

As we head into this, it’s important to keep in mind that Fani Willis’ previous grand jury has already done all the serious legwork, in terms of helping build the case and assembling it into a report. At this point the only thing the newly empaneled grand jury has to do is hear the case and vote to indict – a process that could theoretically take as little as one day per target. From here the process will go more slowly than you’d like it to, but more quickly than you fear it will.

As for Jack Smith, given his penchant for secrecy, it’s possible that his 1/6 indictment against Trump could happen out of nowhere at any minute. By all accounts he’s already built (or mostly built) his case with his grand jury. Fani Willis has given us some guidance along the way in terms of her intended timeframe. Smith, as federal prosecutors tend to do, has given us no guidance at all.