Here comes that Fulton County grand jury against Donald Trump
The Fulton County Georgia DA seated a special grand jury today against Donald Trump. This grand jury will issue subpoenas, hear from witnesses, and allow the DA to build her case as quickly as possible. Then once the probe is complete, she’ll present the case to a regular grand jury and have it bring criminal indictments.
Words like “quickly” have a different meaning in the legal world than they do on the internet. While the DA has interviewed dozens of voluntary witnesses already, there are reportedly dozens of hostile witnesses who now have to be subpoenaed. This long process may take months.
The only thing you can expect to imminently come out of the grand jury is the issuance of subpoenas. But keep in mind that grand jury subpoenas typically don’t become public unless and until a hostile witness receives a subpoena and blabs to the media about it. If none of the subpoenaed witnesses ever do blab, we may have no knowledge of who’s been subpoenaed, who’s cooperating, who all is being targeted, and so on, until much later in the process.
If 90% of politics takes place behind closed doors, then 99% of a criminal probe takes place behind closed doors. A lack of headlines will not mean a lack of grand jury progress. If anything, a headline probably means that a hostile witness is trying to undermine the grand jury’s secrecy by running to the media. That gives us a peek inside the process, but it’s not necessarily a good thing.
If we get a few weeks into this grand jury process, and nothing has leaked to the media, the defeatists will insist it means the whole thing has failed. But that’s not how anything works.
Just by formally requesting this special grand jury, the Fulton County DA has all but committed herself to indicting Trump. Otherwise she’d never get reelected, after spending so much government resources and taxpayer money on a special grand jury for nothing.
The doomsday types will also point to the 2023 expiration date for this grand jury as “proof” that Trump won’t be indicted until after the midterms. But that’s just how long the grand jury is authorized for, not an indication it’ll take that long.
One wildcard: the Fulton County DA has periodically fed the media updates about this case. So while it would have to be generic enough not to mess with the grand jury process, it’s possible she’ll continue to provide media updates during the grand jury process.
Keep in mind that this probe is reportedly targeting Trump, Meadows, Giuliani, and Lindsey Graham, among others. While a Trump indictment is nearly a given in the end, we could also potentially see numerous additional people indicted.
Even if the indictments do happen before the midterms, it might give us a little boost in the polls, but it won’t be a substitute for the things that’ll actually win the midterms: voter registration, outreach, phone banking, and so on. That’s always how we win, when we win.
