'Far-fetched' to think Trump would be indicted before co-conspirators in Jan. 6 case: legal expert

Donald Trump appears to be on the brink of a third indictment, this time for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, but a legal expert cautioned that those charges might be on hold until next month.

Special counsel Jack Smith's office just obtained thousands of pages of documents from former New York City police commissioner Bernie Kerik, who helped Rudy Giuliani look for nonexistent evidence of fraud, and MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance told "Morning Joe" that prosecutors are continuing to interview witnesses as part of their sprawling investigation.

"What is the real timeline here?" Vance said. "Unfortunately for us as observers, it's awfully tough to say at this point. On the one hand, sending the target letter, telling the former president, if his retelling is truthful, he had four days to respond and appear in front of the grand jury, well, that made it look like we would see an indictment even as early as last week, which we know didn't happen. But pushing back against that fast timeline is this notion that the special counsel is still talking with witnesses, still engaging in interviews."

That suggests investigators are not finished with their work, and Vance doubts they would charge the former president before his co-conspirators.

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"I think the answer is while we could see an indictment any day, it's possible that there could be a strategy, for instance, to indict Trump alone and to continue to work on the rest of the case," Vance said. "That seems a little bit far-fetched to me. This is a case where you want to play everything by the books. You want to treat this the indictment like you would any other case, prepare it against any and all of the defendants you're looking at."

"We are told there is a conspiracy charge," she added. "That means that Trump would not be a standalone defendant, he would need some co-defendants. Looks like [the Department of Justice] is tying up the last few things that they need in terms of details, and that they will indict at some point in the next couple of weeks, perhaps as early as this week. I think a little more likely is a couple weeks out."

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