I Love A Contrarian

I wasted more than two hours yesteday watching Terrence Bradley's testimony in the Fani Willis-Nathan Wade hearing. I watched the usual commentators, but Michael Lebron, who posts on YouTube as Lionel, had the best series of takes in the link at the top of this post:

First of all, I don't want to be a killjoy, and I don't want to ruin anybody's fun, but much too much has been made of his testimony. I'm sorry, I know that's horrible to say, I know people think like this is the most important -- it's not the most important thing in the least. . . . What it was is an abssolute cluster[redacted] in terms of lying on parade, the likes of which nobody has ever seen. And it was a beautiful combination of lying and absolute stupidity.

. . . This is a grown man. This is a lawyer who is a combination of imbecilic and an amnesiac. . . . I've never seen this before. . . . This guy is just a buffoon. . . . I'm thinking maybe he's like jumping on the grenade. Maybe he's, he's, deliberately acting this stupid so that we'll forrgetr Fani, Fanny, whatever her name is, and Wade, and forget about . . . and meanwhile, what they forget about is Trump. Trump's not even in this anymore.

Bradley has been a puzzle all along. Commentators after his February 16 testimony, in which he struggled to do exactly what he did today, answer no substantive questions, were stumped by why Anna Cross, the counsel for Willis's office, then proceeded systematically to assassinate Bradley's character by bringing out allegations of sexual harassment against him. The commentators more or less assumed this would destroy any further support and cooperation Bradley might give to Willis and Wade, and once the judge ruled attorney-client privilege didn't apply, Bradley would feel free to spill all.

Didn't happen. Omerta continued to prevail throughout the day. Another commentator, David Freiheit posting as Viva Frei, ploints out at 6:30 below,

Notable as to who was there and who wasn't there, Fani Willis was not there. Anna Cross, the attorney who opened up this entire can of worms, also not there. Who was there? Nathan Wade was there. Nathan Wade was there and as I observed at the time, at some point during the testimony was standing up, staring down at Terrence Bradley on the stand, I won't say menacingly, because that's subjective, but definitely staring him down. . . . In fact,he was staring him down for a good portion of his testimony, as we saw from a few moments where they panned through the room and saw Nathan Wade in the courtroom.

. . . And then I guess after Nathan Wade got the assurance that Terrence was gonna play ball and not rat him out, Nathan Wade was gone.

All anyone can conclude is that Wade in particular had some even greater hold on Bradley that went beyond the character assassination in the sexual harassment allegations that were brought out on February 16, and Bradley was most assiduously toeing the line. That Bradley had been heavily coached, despite his insistence under oath that he hadn't been, seems to have been plain to the Trump defendants' counsel as well as likely to Judge McAfee.

The bigger question is whether, or how, Bradley's non-testimony will affect Judge McAfee's conclusions. I'm inclined to go along with Lionel, that it's de minimis. But Alan Dershowitz posted his reactions:

At 3:02:

I saw with my own eyes how he testified, and how he provided very revelatory information about it. The information, the revelatory information was not necessarily in his testimony, it was in his texts. It was in the texts that he had written to the lawyer which he confirmed as true. You could not come away from that two-hour hearing without absolutely believing that this guy, Terrence Bradley, had told the lawyers for Trump's codefendants thaat the relationship definitely began before he was hired as special prosecutor, which they have sworn is the opposite. You could not escape that. And the judge knows that.

At 5:40 he assesses:

I'm just not sure what the judge is going to do in this case. This is very hard, this is a judge in Fulton County. Will the judge have the cojones to actually look the elected district attorney in the eye and say, "I have listened to your tetimony, I've listened to your boyfriend's testimony, I've listened to his lawyer's testimony, I do not believe you." Will he have the nerve to say that? I don't think so. I don't think so. But if he's an honest and decent judge, at the very least, he'll find that they are recused. If I had to bet widows' and orphans' money that I couldn't afford to lose, on the outcome, probably a safe bet would be that he will recuse the special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, because that's easy, she can get somebody else, saying there's an appearance of injustice. . .

This leaves out the practical issues of replacing Wade before we get to any other problem. Fani isn't very bright, but she's bright enough to know that whomever she appoints to that job has to be absolutely beholden to her and in her pocket, as Wade clearly was, especially in the wake of this whole kerfuffle. An outsider would presumably be coming in having to deal with dirty laundry all over the place left over from the highly compromised Wade-Willis relationship, and Willis would need to be able to rely on the replacement to keep things under cover.

That would be a hard choice for Fani, and it would likely provide additional openings in additional discovery for the Trump et al defense. And it would leave aside the question of how long it would take Wade's successor to come up to date on the case -- and in fact, it would leave aside the serious question of whether Wade himself had actually done much on the case before being removed.

And that in turn leaves aside that however Judge McAfee rules, the losing side will appeal. This whole case is out of reach if the intent is to get a conviction before the election.