"Under the federal rules of criminal procedure, a grand jury is empaneled by a judge and can be discharged only by that judge (or another judge, in case the empaneling judge is removed from the case or is no longer on the bench). Ordinarily, a judge’s decision to discharge a grand jury is ministerial, because the prosecutor defines the grand jury’s “scope of work” – the prosecutor asks the grand jury to issue indictments on particular charges, and the grand jury either does so or doesn’t (though it almost always does, in run-of-the-mill cases). When the grand jury has decided on the charges proposed by the prosecutor, the judge discharges the grand jury.
But that is just ordinary practice, and the events we are contemplating are not ordinary. Last August, Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia empaneled a grand jury to hear evidence from the special counsel. That grand jury would not automatically terminate if Mueller and his team were fired. Legally, the individual U.S. citizens currently hearing evidence from Mueller’s investigation will remain a duly constituted grand jury until Howell discharges them. And Trump does not have the power to order Howell to do so.
In the event Mueller and his team were to be fired, Howell will have a big decision to make.
If she permits the grand jury to continue, she will hardly be acting without precedent. When America’s founders wrote the Constitution, and for 150 years thereafter, it was not uncommon for so-called runaway grand juries to go beyond the prosecutor’s “instructions” in issuing indictments. These runaway grand juries became virtually extinct after the 1930s, when a new law required a prosecutor’s signature before an indictment can be issued."
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/14/trump-can-fire-mueller-but-not-a-grand-jury-216975?lo=ap_f1
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