Former President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he received a letter naming him a target in a grand jury investigation into the January 6 efforts to halt the confirmation of the 2020 presidential election results.
Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, told followers on his social media platform Truth Social that he received a letter from Special Counsel Jack Smith warning him about a possible indictment.
As reported by Reuters, Smith “sent a letter (again, it was Sunday night!) stating that I am a TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury investigation,” the former president wrote.
During Tuesday’s Fox News town hall in Iowa, Trump argued that Smith and other prosecutors were working to help Biden.
“This guy is a deranged prosecutor,” Trump said of Smith. “He’s a nasty, horrible human being.”
NPR reported that Smith and his team have also called on former Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s son-in-law and former senior advisor Jared Kushner to testify before grand juries in Washington, D.C.
According to USA Today, prosecutors send target letters to people under investigation, calling them to testify about their actions and warning them of the possibility of arrest and indictment.
Brandon Van Grack, a former senior Justice Department lawyer and prosecutor, noted that the target letter means that Trump could be indicted as early as next week.
“Using the Mar-a-Lago case as a guide, an indictment could come next week,” said Grack, who served as a lead prosecutor for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 election.
The probe is investigating whether Trump incited supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, to halt the Electoral College vote that put Joe Biden in office.
The invitation is also looking into Trump’s efforts to overturn Biden’s wins in multiple states and whether the former president and others worked together to block the certification of Biden’s victory.
Among those states is Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has launched a separate investigation into Trump.
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Jeff J. Mitchell/Staff
Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for Christian Headlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.