A little more than three months ago, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis argued for keeping a special-grand-jury report secret, at least for the time being: “Decisions are imminent” with regard to bringing charges, she said. But last month, Willis indicated in a letter to the sheriff requesting additional security that decisions would come sometime between July 11 and September 1.

Whether that qualifies as “imminent” is partly a matter of semantics and partly about the speed of a huge and backlogged county-court system. Willis, like Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is also investigating former President Donald Trump, may have very good reasons for working deliberately—but every day that decisions don’t come puts the judicial calendar into greater conflict with the political calendar. The campaign has already begun, and it will grow more intense through the rest of 2023 and into early November 2024. How the trial of a leading presidential candidate will unfold simultaneously is beyond precedent and in the land of guesswork.

The two systems are not designed to accommodate each other’s needs—in fact, they sometimes go out of their way to not account for each other. Usually, that has the positive effect of insulating the justice system from the appearance of political interference or influence. But Trump has a knack for finding the weak spots in systems and exploiting them, and he will do so here as well.

[Kimberly Wehle: Yes, he could still be president from prison]

As is typical for prosecutors, Willis has not offered much explanation for her timeline. Although the special grand jury conducted a long investigation, Willis has to obtain any indictments from a normal grand jury. Fulton County’s grand juries are seated in eight-week increments, and prosecutors would be unlikely to bring a complicated case such as the election matter in the final weeks of any grand jury’s stint. Court watchers have noted that Fulton grand juries tend to produce indictments on a regular pace, so if no indictments appear for a few days, it could indicate that the jurors are hearing the complicated election case.

No one except Willis and her team knows exactly why she still hasn’t made the charging decisions public. “It’s hard to say, because it’s such a black box, but the things we have seen come out suggest that it’s not unlikely, even probable, that the Fulton County District Attorney’s office is uncovering new things, especially if they have people who are newly willing to cooperate,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, told me.

Willis’s letter to the sheriff has fueled speculation that a Trump indictment is likely, the attorney and former prosecutor Titus Nichols told me drily—“You only do that if it’s going to be a big person that’s going to be indicted, a big person that tends to have people throw violent riots in support of them”—but he added that the backlash to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Trump might have encouraged some caution: “After watching the media circus, the prosecutor probably wants to make sure that all her i’s are dotted and her t’s are crossed. You saw how quickly people nitpicked the New York indictment.”

Big cases, especially ones that deal with large numbers of potential defendants and unusual crimes, as Willis’s and Smith’s do, take a long time. Yet whether prosecutors are dilatory or moving quickly, the election timeline means that they will face more pressure on their cases as November 2024 gets closer. During the campaign, scheduling and logistical headaches will multiply. Holding a trial during the heat of campaigning would also give Trump even more of an opportunity to present it as political persecution meant to sabotage his presidential bid—though he will surely say so regardless of what stage the investigations are at by then. The Justice Department faces an additional time pressure: If Trump or any other Republican wins the 2024 election, once in office—and thus once overseeing the Justice Department—he or she will likely end any case against the former president.

The court system demonstrated during the Trump presidency that it was ill-equipped for the challenge he poses. When Democrats won the House back in the 2018 midterms, they embarked on various oversight investigations, but as I wrote in 2019, Trump employed a technique he had used to great effect in the private sector: dragging court proceedings out for as long as possible. The point wasn’t even to win any of his various motions; he just had to either wear out the opposition or stall to the point of irrelevance.

For example, Trump was able to prolong wrangling over his tax returns so long that House Democrats didn’t receive the documents until November 2022—two years after he lost reelection. Deliberation is an essential characteristic of the judicial system, but during the Trump administration, the courts treated an arguably emergency matter as standard business. In the past, judges have understood when to move quickly: Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski subpoenaed Richard Nixon in April 1974, and the Supreme Court heard arguments on appeal on July 8 and issued an opinion on July 24.

Trump has already begun filing a flurry of long-shot motions in Fulton County. “It’s the same playbook as in Trump v. Vance, Trump v. Mazars,” Jed Shugerman, a professor at Fordham University School of Law, told me. “Anything that happens now has some colorable legal argument to get into federal court and play out the legal arguments, win or lose, that will add a year to the start of any trial.”

[David A. Graham: Unprecedented]

The Department of Justice has typically issued internal guidance against prosecutions with political valence in the 90 days before an election. But local prosecutors don’t have similar rules, and besides, the question of a county district attorney indicting a serious contender for president hasn’t been a live issue previously. Moreover, the 90-day buffer seems quaint in an era when campaigns stretch out for years. Trump declared his presidency almost immediately after the 2022 midterms, and some commentators had long worried that he would run for office with the goal of preventing, or at least complicating, any prosecution against him.

“This is a long-standing tension in our systems,” Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, told me. “It’s essential that the criminal-justice system not take political matters into account. We want prosecutors to make their judgments about crimes and the provability of crimes without fear or favor—especially without political fear or favor.”

Aftergut pointed to James Comey’s October 2016 announcement about the discovery of new emails related to Hillary Clinton. The announcement went against the DOJ guidance, and some analysts believe it cost Clinton the election—which of course got us to where we are now. “If prosecutors operate with consciousness of politics, the danger to our constitutional republic is extreme,” Aftergut said.

But not everyone agrees that this traditional approach is the best way to safeguard the system. Shugerman points to Bragg as a cautionary tale. The Manhattan DA’s indictment of Trump has been widely criticized: Not only did Bragg rely on a somewhat untested legal approach, but he also offered no explanation of the underlying crimes that allowed him to charge Trump with felonies rather than misdemeanors. That’s standard in most indictments, but Shugerman argues that in a case such as Trump’s, it actually hurts the cause of justice.

(Willis is aware of the backlash to Bragg’s actions. This week, she told WABE that she had tracked the case: “Well, certainly the citizens that elected the DA in Fulton have a district attorney that pays attention, so let’s just say I paid attention.”)

“The norms have been too protective of prosecutorial silence. We need norms of prosecutors giving more reasons,” Shugerman told me. And because Bragg and Fulton are both already elected officials (and Democrats), he doesn’t buy the claim that they’re separated from the grime of politics: “My argument is that because they’re political actors and the partisan appearance of their action is so understandable, they have more of a duty to explain when there is an understandable partisan political significance to their indictments.”

Although they end in different places, both sides of this argument start from the same premise: In a time of novel challenges, the criminal-justice system’s integrity is essential. “Legitimacy is not optics,” Shugerman told me. “The law depends upon legitimacy.” But Trump has so shaken expectations that determining what will best preserve that legitimacy is no easy task.