So when will the next January 6th Committee criminal indictment happen?
Yesterday the Department of Justice announced that it had obtained a grand jury indictment against Steve Bannon on two counts of felony contempt of Congress, in response to the January 6th Committee’s criminal referral against him. So when will the next shoe drop? It might be quicker than you think.
It ended up taking Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice three weeks to indict Bannon. But does that mean that three weeks will now be the standard running time for any new criminal referral? Maybe not.
If I had to guess, I might say that the DOJ was waiting to see what the courts did with the executive privilege case that Donald Trump brought against the National Archives. The judge in the case ruled earlier this week that Trump had no executive privilege standing. If the appeals court had let yesterday’s deadline pass without intervening, it would have been a clear cut ruling that Trump indeed has no executive privilege, which would nullify Steve Bannon’s ludicrous claim that he has executive privilege. The DOJ could have used this in the Bannon indictment.
But the appeals court did intervene on Thursday, delaying things by perhaps a month. If my guess is correct, then the DOJ decided it didn’t want to wait another month just to include this ruling as part of the Bannon indictment, so it went ahead and indicted him the day after the appeals court made its move.
This is just a guess based on timing. But if it’s correct, it means the DOJ isn’t messing around. It declined to wait another month just so it could use the appeals court ruling to spit-shine the Bannon indictment, and instead just went for it yesterday by indicting him.
This would suggest that the three week timetable for indicting Bannon was more about hoping the courts would provide an assist, and that the DOJ didn’t really need a three week procedural process to obtain the indictment. Since the courts have now taken themselves out of the picture, the DOJ would have no need to take three weeks for upcoming indictments. This would point to very swift indictments on upcoming contempt referrals.
The next criminal referral (presumably against Mark Meadows unless he caves at the last second) should be revealing. If that indictment also takes three weeks, then we’ll know that that’s the standard timeframe we can expect going forward. But if it takes just a few days, then we’ll know we’re off to the races.
Keep in mind the DOJ can’t even start its engines until it actually receives a criminal referral from Congress. So the clock won’t start on Meadows until the committee and the full House hold contempt votes. But once that happens, it’ll be useful to track the days until Meadows’ indictment so we’ll know what timeframes to expect going forward after that.
