Former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal said Wednesday he thinks Donald Trump will be indicted "soon" by special counsel Jack Smith.
Katyal made the prediction during an appearance on MSNBC while discussing the news that Trump lawyers had requested a meeting with U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to discuss the dual Justice Department investigations led by Smith.
Smith is overseeing two criminal investigations into the former president and his allies. One probe involves Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The other concerns Trump's alleged mishandling of highly classified national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving the White House.
On Tuesday, Trump posted a letter on his Truth Social platform that his attorneys John Rowley and James Trusty sent to Garland to arrange a meeting with the attorney general at his "earliest convenience."
The brief letter offered no specifics about what the lawyers expected from the meeting with Garland. But the attorneys wrote that "Trump is being treated unfairly" and said that he was being "baselessly investigated" in an "outrageous and unlawful fashion."
Speaking to MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace, Katyal called the letter a "last-ditch effort."
"It's the kind of thing you do right before you think you're about to be indicted, and it is likely—almost certainly—going nowhere," he said.
As for when a Trump indictment from Smith might be issued, Katyal said that given "the scope of the investigation and "how it heated up in the last few weeks," his "expectation is this is going to be soon."
Newsweek reached out to representatives for Trump via email for comment.
Katyal, who served in the Obama administration as the acting solicitor general, supervising and conducting government litigation in the U.S. Supreme Court, said: "Garland has already signaled that he believes Jack Smith should basically make these calls [about indictments]. He'll only jump in if something is egregiously wrong."
Katyal noted that Garland "has a long-standing reputation in Washington of being bipartisan, of being a careful and respected jurist on both sides of the aisle."
However, he said, the attorney general is still "a political appointee."
"When we're talking about something as sensitive as 'Do you indict a former president?' it would make all the sense in the world that's a Jack Smith determination," Katyal said.
"That's what Donald Trump is afraid of. He's afraid of having someone independent do this. If it's someone political, at least he can trash it as being political or this or that. So this is Trump's worst nightmare," he said.
Neama Rahmani, the president of West Coast Trial Lawyers and a former federal prosecutor, told Newsweek that the "only people who know for sure are Jack Smith and Merrick Garland, but there is a lot of smoke coming out of the Department of Justice."
He added the Trump's lawyers wanting to meet with Garland "is a sign that charges may be imminent."
"Trump's lawyers haven't been very cooperative with the DOJ [Department of Justice] so far with respect to classified documents, so this shift is telling," Rahmani said. "Also, DOJ policy frowns on indicting a defendant close to an election when the charges may influence the outcome of the race, so if Trump is going to be charged, he may be before the presidential primaries begin."
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About the writer
Jon Jackson is an Associate Editor at Newsweek based in New York. His focus is on reporting on the Ukraine ... Read more
