Prosecutors in sprawling Trump probes crowd court calendars: legal expert

Former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance said Wednesday that prosecutors in the sprawling investigations of Donald Trump are crowding court calendars and risk bumping into the heart of election season – and each other.

Vance suggested that with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis poised to indict the former president within weeks over allegations he tried to interfere with Georgia’s 2020 election, special counsel Jack Smith could expedite his timetable for a decision on whether to indict Trump in a separate probe over the former president’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Vance during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight” said Smith and Willis’ investigations are likely to overlap to some degree.

Vance suggested Smith’s timeline could be impacted by events in Georgia in response to a question from Wagner, who noted Willis previously stated a decision over whether to indict Trump would likely happen this summer.

“We're talking about three weeks here,” Wagner said.

“So it's tough to make those guesses and even prosecutors themselves sometimes don't know for certain exactly when an indictment will drop because there's some fine tuning that might have to be done with evidence toward the end of that preparation time, but the timeline does make a lot of sense,” Vance said.

“We're about to enter into the campaign season, things will begin to pick up, prosecutors of course like to avoid interfering during that sort of process with something as astonishing as the indictment of one of the leading candidates, even though it's been long anticipated, and DOJ’s summer calendar makes a little bit of sense here. Typically you'll see people prepare and finalize things in late July or perhaps in one of the first two weeks of August, so I think the calendar may dictate that.”

But Vance qualified her response by saying what’s unusual about these circumstances is that Willis, who has been investigating the allegations against Trump for almost 2 ½ years, had about a year’s head start on the special counsel’s probe.

“…DOJ, of course, had that first year, where there didn't appear to be any investigative activity, the United States Attorney's Office in Atlanta, which would have had jurisdiction over these charges that Fani Willis is looking at and apparently is prepared to indict on, they did not pursue them. And that was what led to her entry into this race. So she has a good bit of time, ahead of Jack Smith,” Vance said.

“There's no indication that they’ve worked together to coordinate or even to divvy up charges. She has had conversations with a number of in-state Georgia Republicans, those who were involved in preparing states like slates of electors, and she could certainly have charges internal to Georgia that she would be able to indict. But by all appearances, she's looking at a much larger conspiracy, one that really may bump into the evidence that Jeff Smith has, so it'll be interesting to watch this unfold.”