Prepare to be shocked by some of what’s coming next
Watching a complex high profile secretive federal criminal probe from the outside, and trying to figure out what’s really going on, is somewhat like watching a mystery movie and trying to guess the ending. But it’s different in the sense that the best mystery movies will deviously put all the clues right in front of you the whole time but in the wrong context, meaning you theoretically could have been able to figure it all out, even though you didn’t. In contrast, federal criminal probes try not to put anything in front of you if they can help it.
It very much appears that even after Jack Smith criminally indicts Donald Trump for espionage in the coming hours or days, his probe will continue. After all, Smith also has the Trump 1/6 probe, the Trump wire fraud probe, and the Trump international finances probe. But once that first Trump indictment does surface, it’ll be chock full of details about how the classified documents probe has been playing out behind the scenes.
If you’ve been following the classified documents probe closely, a lot of what ends up being in the indictment text will be exactly what you were expecting. But a lot of other things in the indictment text will likely surprise or even shock you. I’ve followed this probe closely every day, for as long as I’ve known of its existence, and I’m preparing to be surprised by some of the things that are about to come out.
That’s because this isn’t a mystery movie. Prosecutors have not constructed the mysteries surrounding this secretive criminal probe for your entertainment. Instead, someone like Jack Smith generally tries to keep his entire case a secret from the public, so that the targets and hostile witnesses don’t know what’s going on. The less they know about the probe, the less they’re able to scheme against it. If Smith had his way, we’d all be sitting here staring at a blank screen, instead of obsessing over the details that have made it out to the public.
So it’s time for us all to accept that we’ve been watching a mystery movie that’s tried to reveal as few details and clues as possible. And now we’re about to see some final twists in the indictment text that we couldn’t have possibly seen coming, because prosecutors made a point of giving us zero information about them. As I said, some of what we’re about to learn from Jack Smith will be exactly what we already guessed was coming. And some of it will truly catch us off guard.
