The Justice Department has quietly convened a special grand jury in Washington, a rarely used legal weapon that could let federal prosecutors dig into some of the biggest and most explosive cases in the capital.
Unlike a regular grand jury, this special one can drop a public report naming people even if prosecutors decide they don’t have enough evidence to charge anyone. The bar is only a “preponderance of the evidence” of wrongdoing. Anyone named gets a chance to testify and call their own witnesses.
These juries are reserved for unusual cases: investigations of government officials, broad conspiracies, or organized criminal activity. Corruption cases that prosecutors deem to be linked could qualify as the latter. The 23 jurors focus on one case or a cluster of related ones instead of the usual mixed docket. They require a formal request from the Attorney General or their designee and approval from the district’s chief judge, who in D.C. is James E. Boasberg. The panel generally lasts 18 months and can be extended up to a total of 36 months.
The D.C. panel will be overseen by Steven Vandervelden, one of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s closest deputies. Pirro has already tapped him for high-profile probes, including one into then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and another examining claims that D.C. police deliberately cooked their crime numbers.
