Who’s going down with the ship
Last month it was reported that Jack Smith had given “fake electors” a deadline of June 30th to decide whether to cooperate under an immunity deal or get criminally indicted – and at least a few of them are known to have taken that deal.
At the time, this made me wonder if Smith had given everyone not named “Donald Trump” the same deadline. Then Rudy Giuliani went in and did a proffer session just ahead of June 30th, which suggested that the people on his level had also been given that deadline. Since June 30th came and went, we’ve seen a flurry of major media reports about Jack Smith targeting everyone on Giuliani’s level – including Sidney Powell, John Eastman, and Jenna Ellis.
If these lawyers were all given that same June 30th deadline to either cooperate or get indicted, that deadline has now come and gone – and we could simply be waiting for the grand jury to meet again before they’re indicted. Could that happen this week? Next week? I’ve grown fond of saying that it’s a fool’s errand to try to predict the precise date that a grand jury indictment will happen. But there sure are a whole lot of signs that we’re once again very close to indictments happening.
Of course we’re still left with more questions than answers. Did Giuliani manage to buy himself any serious leniency with his proffer session? Will he cut a formal cooperation deal on reduced charges, or wait to see what he’s charged with? Is it possible that others such as Powell and Eastman have also taken steps toward cooperation that have gone unreported, or have they decided (for now) to go down with the ship?
Then there’s the big question of whether Donald Trump will be indicted at the same time as the Giuliani-Powell crowd, or sometime afterward. Trump spent the Fourth of July ranting and raving so obsessively, it’s almost as if he’d been tipped off that indictments are about to drop. But even then, is he panicking because he expects to be imminently indicted again, or simply because he expects everyone directly under him to be imminently indicted?
So many questions, so few answers. But that’s where we usually find ourselves while waiting for an end-stage criminal probe to start spitting out indictments. It’s a stage where prosecutors still need to keep most of what they’re doing a secret, in order to keep the moving pieces going in the direction they want. In any case, all signs suggest that we’ll start getting a whole lot of answers rather soon.
