Whatever Jack Smith's third grand jury is up to, it isn't good for Trump

Special counsel Jack Smith was appointed on Nov. 18, 2022. Within the next two weeks, Smith had assembled a team of nearly two dozen federal prosecutors. Before the end of the month, Smith had empaneled two federal grand juries—one to hear testimony concerning Donald Trump’s actions in connection to the 2020 election, the second for the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents. Before November was out, dozens of subpoenas for testimony before those grand juries had already been delivered.

More than two years after Trump left office, it’s easy to be upset about the speed with which federal authorities have moved to hold him responsible for his numerous and apparently obvious crimes. It’s much harder to be upset with Smith, who in seven months has conducted what appears to be a wide-ranging investigation into everything from Trump’s schemes to replace the attorney general with someone more coup-friendly, to claims that security video at Mar-a-Lago was lost because someone drained the swimming pool.

One of Smith’s two grand juries, the one hearing the classified documents case, went into a reported hiatus earlier this month after hearing testimony from dozens, if not hundreds, of witnesses, ranging from former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to 20 members of Trump’s Secret Service security detail. Many observers regarded this as a sign that Smith was preparing to either issue indictments or make a statement that the investigation had not led to findings that could be charged. And considering the wealth of public evidence about how Trump hid documents, stonewalled investigators, and bragged about showing off classified information, the odds of indictment seemed very high.

But now something has happened that no one was predicting: Smith has created grand jury number three.