DOJ Told Court to Expect a Deluge of New Jan. 6 Prosecutions

[ancianita]

29. The DOJ is giving a heads up to the new chief judge of the DC court, James E. Boasberg.

Chief judge, Beryl A. Howell's term ends this week.
The new chief judge, James E. Boasberg, takes over the second-floor offices at the courthouse — and a key behind-the-scenes role overseeing the grand jury that is hearing testimony in the Trump investigation.

The two jurists will hold a passing-the-gavel ceremony on Friday, dropping Judge Boasberg into tangled disputes over executive privilege and other grand jury issues central to the federal special counsel investigation into the events surrounding Jan. 6, along with Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving office.

There is no obvious reason to believe that the turnover will bring a major new approach: Both are experienced jurists and Obama appointees, and in handing down sentences to ordinary Jan. 6 defendants, neither has been a particularly harsh nor usually lenient outlier.

Still, as their colleague Judge Randolph D. Moss noted, analyzing what the turnover could mean for oversight of the investigation is hard because “even the other judges on the court don’t have much of an insight into what has been going on in the grand jury.”

But some word has filtered out from the grand jury room that Judge Howell dispatched with claims of privilege that Mr. Trump mounted in an unsuccessful attempt to block testimony by two aides to former Vice President Mike Pence, Greg Jacob and Marc Short. (Judge Howell recently rejected a request by The New York Times and Politico to unseal her executive privilege rulings and associated materials related to the Jan. 6 grand jury.)

The turnover comes at a particularly delicate time for Mr. Trump, who -- in addition to the federal investigations being overseen by Jack Smith, the special counsel -- faces possible indictment soon on unrelated state charges in New York, and is also under scrutiny by a prosecutor in Georgia examining efforts to reverse his election loss there.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/13/us/politics/trump-judge-james-boasberg.html