The news that the Manhattan grand jury tasked with weighing whether to hand up an indictment against President Trump will not only go on hiatus for the rest of the week but also plans to take much of April off only sharpens the sense that District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against the former president is far from a sure thing.

The meandering stands in stark contrast to the pace set by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who appears to have taken the match on the New York County prosecutor despite coming on the scene only in recent months. While Mr. Smith’s successes have largely been hidden because they have transpired under seal, the former war crimes prosecutor is running up the score against Mr. Trump. 

For a man who was laid up with a bicycle injury when he was first tapped by Attorney General Garland, Mr. Smith’s progress on his two portfolios — the Mar-a-Lago documents trove and Mr. Trump’s actions on January 6 — has transpired at startling speed. Those courtroom victories have set the stage for a breakthrough.

The latest win is a high profile one that cuts to constitutional bedrock. Vice President Pence will reportedly be forced to testify about events that transpired before January 6 as well as any potential illegal activities on the part of President Trump. This order comes despite Mr. Pence’s invocation of the protections of the Speech or Debate Clause.

Mr. Smith’s victory on this front was not total, as the district judge overseeing the case, James Boasberg, reportedly ruled that Mr. Pence is protected from testifying about the events of January 6 itself.  The former vice president reports that he told Mr. Trump that day that they “both took an oath to support and defend the Constitution.”

After the verdict, Mr. Pence told NewsMax that he was “pleased that the court accepted our argument and recognized that the Constitution’s provision about speech and debate does apply to the vice president” but that the “way they sorted that out and the requirements of my testimony going forward are a subject of our review right now.” He added that he has “nothing to hide.”

Even if Mr. Smith is barred from interrogating Mr. Pence about what he saw and heard on January 6, access to the Vice President’s recollections of the days and weeks before, when the alleged pressure from Mr. Trump to undo the election results was most intense, would constitute an invaluable evidentiary vein for the government to mine. 

Mr. Pence wrote about that period in his memoir, “So Help Me God,” but testimony given under oath would have a glidepath into evidentiary admission at trial. Judge Boasberg also rejected Mr. Trump’s assertion that his parlays with Mr. Pence are covered by executive privilege, although the jurist’s reasoning is still shrouded in secrecy.  

Executive privilege likewise did not avail for half a dozen officials in the Trump Administration, highlighted by the former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who claimed that protection to block their testimonies. Another district judge, Beryl Howell, swatted that effort aside. A Trump spokesman responded that the government is “attempting to destroy the long accepted, long held, Constitutionally based standards of attorney-client privilege and executive privilege.” 

The former privilege was at issue in yet another victory for Mr. Smith, this time in the Mar-a-Lago case. Judge Howell ruled that Mr. Smith demonstrated enough criminality to set aside attorney client privilege via the crime-fraud exception, which ordains that if communications with a lawyer are in furtherance of a crime, they are unprotected. Mr. Corcoran testified before a grand jury for more than three hours on Friday.