Fani Agonistes

This utter'd, straining all his nerves he bow'd,
As with the force of winds and waters pent,
When Mountains tremble, those two massie Pillars
With horrible convulsion to and fro,
He tugg'd, he shook, till down thy came and drew
The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder
Upon the heads of all who sate beneath,

I haven't thought about Milton's Samson Agonistes in quite a while. This is a poetic drama based on the story in the book of Judges that culminates in Samson, a great warrior captured, enslaved, and blinded by the Philistines, gaining revenge on them by pulling down their temple around them.

What reminded me of this was the YouTuber Viva Frei's commentary on yesterday's continuing testimony at the evidentiary hearing on Fani Willis's conflicts of interest in the Fulton County Trump RICO case, especially in regard to their bringing an accusation of sexual assault against Terrence Bradley, a witness who was trying to invoke attorney-client privilege to protect Willis and Wade:

At 21:00, he explains,

They took Terrence Bradley, threw him under the bus, destroyed him, ruined his life, and it's not because I'm steel manning [giving the strongest interpretation of] the reason, I can't understand why. Some people are saying, "Look, the judge is going to take in camera, confidentially, behind closed doors, uh, secretly, he's going to look at what was argued to be solicitor-client protected, uh, information, and he's going to see that it's not, and he's going to then consider it as evidence.

So they need to destroy Terrence Bradley's credibility by, uh, depicting him as a sexual assaulter, such that, you know, when he said that the affadavit contained accurate information, the judge won't believe him there, but even if that's the steel manning of the argument, it makes no sense. What they've basically done now is opened the box, the Pandora's box, {to Terrence] Bradley breaching whatever solicitor-client privilege he'd been invoking.

When Anna Cross [counsel for the state defending Willis] says, "You guys were friends, right?" and he says, "Yeah," well, there you go! You were friends, so you had discussions as friends and not just as solicitor-client, tell us about those! When did he tell you that he first boned Fani Willis? When did he brag about it?

I mean, for goodness sake, it opens that door. But it also opens the door to the fact that they basically just made enemies with the only guy who was just sitting there defending Nathan Wade by invoking privilege. It makes no sense, uh, and some people are suggesting like it's an ultra super double mega cross, I don't know, throw the case under the bus so it doesn't go to trial so that it doesn't reveal actual election fraud in Georgia, I don't know.

Other people are suggesting that this is how vindictive Fani Willis and Nathan Wade are by mere virtue of the fact that Terrence Bradley ever even talked to Ashleigh Merchant, they were going to destroy him from the beginning.

There's little question that at least on reflection after Day 1, Fani Willis began to recognize at some level that everything was a smoking ruin. Most commentators had begun to characterize the evidentiary hearing as an "embarrassment", while others like Alan Dershowitz simply said, "What a mess. What a mess." The best outcome for Willis and Wade is likely to be just disqualification as prosecutors, but they could still at least keep their law licenses.

But the Georgia Senate has opened an investigation, the county auditor is on the case, and they could well face disbarment, as well as tax problems. Even if we take the utterly best possible outcome, that Judge McAfee says, "Nothing to see here, Ms Willis and Mr Wade are fully vindicated," the RICO defendants, Trump and the others, will simply appeal the judge's ruling, and the whole Fulton County RICO case will be out of reach, impossible to take to trial before the election.

But why, precisely, would Ms Willis be so angry as to pull the case down around her a la Samson Agonistes? Here's the deal as I think she saw it. Her job was to bring down Trump and a couple dozen others, come hell or high water. Her reward was to live high on the hog on that budget. The expectation, at least as she saw it, was that this would be no diffferent from the New York joke prosecutions, the machine would back her up, no questions would be asked, and in fact, she'd be a celebrity. She wouldn't even need to break a sweat.

For whatever reason, the machine didn't back her up. In other words, they didn't keep that part of the tacit bargain, so just as happened with Hunter Biden last summer in Delaware, the whole sweetheart deal was off. So like Samson, she grabbed the columns and pulled down the whole temple on everyone -- I think Viva Frei is right, she's thrown the whole Fulton County RICO case under the bus in revenge.