Whole 'Nother Terrence!

I've echoed the puzzlement of several commentators here over the past couple of weeks -- why did Anna Cross, the counsel in the DA's office representing Willis and Wade, suddenly, gratuitously, and viciously attack Terrence Bradley on the witness stand by bringing up the sexual harassment allegations against him, when Bradley appeared to be doing nothing to damage their interests? After all, he was trying his hardest to have his testimony excluded on the basis of attorney-client privilege.

Let's start with what's obvious. Ashleigh Merchant, the attorney for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, is a blonde bombshell. As it happens, she is also one of the most prominent Georgia defense attorneys -- one of her cases, entirely unrelated, was featured on A&E's Taking the Stand just two weeks ago. Nevertheless, that notwithstanding, I suspect Judge McAfee, and likely many other judges, feels his day goes just a little bit better any time she's in his courtroom. She is aware of this and takes full advantage of it.

This is a normal male impulse. As an avid fan of On Patrol: Live and the previous Live PD, I can't avoid noting that almost all the departments that allow the show to follow their officers feature one or more female officers who are in fact stunningly attractive -- at least one does beauty pageants on her off duty days. I've remarked to my wife that if I knew one of those officers would be the one to pull me over, I'd make an illegal left turn and risk a ticket right in front of her just to get ten minutes of her time and attention while she asked me questions about myself.

So let's apply this to the case of poor Terrence Bradley, who came off in his testimony Tuesday as "a combination of imbecilic and an amnesiac" and in fact appeared to be a staunch Willis-Wade loyalist. Why were they out to get him? The answer is Ashleigh Merchant. He'd been texting her back and forth since last fall, and the difference between then and yesterday is, as one commentator put it, "a whole 'nother Terrence".

Bradley’s testimony on Tuesday, when he frequently couldn’t remember details and seemed uncomfortable with the line of questioning, stands in stark contrast to the tone of his prior text messages with Merchant.

The additional text messages [released yesterday] show Bradley calling Merchant his “friend,” offering unsolicited advice, and also bashing Willis and Wade, Bradley’s former law partner.

Bradley left their law firm in 2022 after allegations surfaced that Bradley sexually assaulted an employee at the firm. Bradley denied those allegations while testifying at an earlier hearing over Willis’s potential disqualification.

Over months of texts, Bradley on a number of occasions disparaged Wade and Willis, calling them “arrogant as f” in one January text to Merchant.

Bradley also indicated that he didn’t want to be directly connected to the allegations and expressed a desire not to be named as the initial source of the information.

“I protected you completely,” Merchant told Bradley about the draft of her motion to disqualify. “Not that you need protection,” Merchant texted. “But I kept you out of it.”

“I really appreciate you keeping me out of,” Bradley replied.

So the answer to the question of why Willis and Wade would have their counsel trash Terrence in public is that Terrence had been trashing them behind their backs for months, and they'd belatedly become aware of it despite Terrence's best efforts. And a good part of the reason for that is that Terrence had been charmed by a beautiful woman who was also very smart. In fact, she was both pretty enough and smart enough to use Terrence to get to Willis and Wade -- the dirt Terrence so eagerly gave her became the foundation of her case for her client and was bound to become a public record, with Terrence as the source.

Terrence, an attorney, should maybe have had an inkling, although it looks like the Wade Bradley Campbell law firm were personal injury attorneys and not well informed about other areas of the law. Terrence, Wade,and Willis were outsmarted by a very pretty attorney who was also very smart. The attack on Terrence from Wade and Willis was delayed payback, and I can't completely blame them, except they all let themselves be outplayed by a highly skilled operator.

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.

It Looks Like The Whole Fulton County Case Was A Grift

As pieces of the puzzle straggle in, I was impressed by the juxtaposition of Nathan Wade's non-report report on the Cobb County jail death scandal from 2020 with what we now know about the timeline of his relationship with Fani Willis. As I linked yesterday,

When Wade finished his investigation later that year, he released no formal public report about what led to the deaths at the notoriously dangerous lock-up.

Asked about his findings for a local TV news investigation, Wade conceded that he created no “documents, communications, or records memorializing, reflecting evidence, or relating to the work,” according to the news station, 11Alive.

“I have obviously my brainchild, what’s going on in my mind about it. That’s what I have,” Wade told a lawyer for 11Alive who was trying to obtain Sheriff’s Department internal records about the probe through public records act requests. That outcome was condemned by local criminal justice reform activists and defense attorneys, some of whom said Wade’s investigation helped the Sheriff’s Department use the pretense of an ongoing investigation to deny public access to potentially embarrassing records.

The link said Wade was engaged to pretend to do a report in June 2020 and finished not writing it some months later. We don't know how much he was paid, nor exactly when he finished, but it's worth noting that by November of that year, he was working with Fani's transition team following her election as Fulton County DA. We do know, as I linked yesterday, that following Ms Willis's taking over the DA's office on January 1, 2021, Wade's law partners got contracts from her office, Christopher Campbell at $150 per hour starting that month and Terrence Bradley for $74,480 over the course of the year. In March and April, Campbell had an additional contract for $65 an hour.

It appears that Wade and Willis were attempting to keep their relationship secret, especially during this period, although Wade's presence and influence in the office was well known to the workers there. Although Willis didn't give Wade any direct contract, the contracts to his partners would have entitled Wade to a third of their billing under their partnership agreement. Thus, at least from January 2021, Wade was receiving indirect payments from Willis, although accounts of his role in the office suggest Wade was the individual who actually selected his partners for the contracts.

In April 2021, Willis moved into Robin Yeartie's condo in Hapeville, which appears to have been used to maintain the secrecy of her relationship with Wade. The Mittelstadt affadavit reported 35 assignations between Willis and Wade at this condo before November of 2021.

It seems to me that what we're seeing is a relationship based on secrecy that embraced not just sex but money, pretty much from the start, and at least from June of 2020, Wade had established himself as a grifter who was collecting fees for not doing things. By the time the Cobb County grift ran out, he had apparently become fully involved with Willis, who by implication in her testimony on February 15 was broke after spending $50,000 on an election she lost. Wade was not only going to keep her warm at night, he was going to make her rich again.

The record shows that Willis was routing cash to Wade before he was named special prosecutor, but once the budget became available for the RICO election interference case, they started riding the gravy train. The question I've had for some time is how this plum landed in Fulton County onto the laps of Willis and Wade -- yes, the White House was pursuing a lawfare strategy against Trump in general, but with so many opportunities at the federal, state, and local levels, why Fulton County in particular?

A Breitbart story from yesterday gives at least a clue:

The Biden administration planted a Democrat operative inside a Fulton County office to target former President Donald Trump, multiple sources familiar with the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office exclusively told Breitbart News.

. . . One significant figure is overlooked in the Fulton County scandal concerning Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis and her alleged lover and fellow prosecutor Nathan Wade, the sources said: Meet Jeff DiSantis — the county’s Deputy District Attorney with professional experience far greater than the average county employee. DiSantis worked on Willis’s 2020 campaign, sources told Breitbart News, and was the former Executive Director of the Democrat Party of Georgia with extensive knowledge of campaign finance law.

. . . Sources credit DiSantis with colluding with the White House to target Trump. “DiSantis did this,” one source told Breitbart News about the Trump case. “He’s the one. He is the one pulling all the strings. He was the one that walled her [Willis] off. He was in every important meeting. He is the brainchild behind this. That is the connection to the White House.”

. . . Sources also revealed that DiSantis was a member of Willis’s transition team after she won the election in November 2020. DiSantis helped Wade select employees for the new office. “DiSantis was there in the capacity to be a political strategist, hiding in the DA’s office,” a source told Breitbart News.

But here's the problem. Wade already appears to have been the kind of guy who'd bill for doing nothing, while one frequent observation about Willis, given her performance on February 15, is that she isn't very smart. More than one commentator has asked why Trump would want to remove Willis as prosecutor if she's as incompetent as she now seems. What on earth was the White House expecting to get from this team? They weren't going to work very hard, and they weren't going to work very smart, but they sure were going to bill for their services, and that's exactly what they did.

The most I can think is that the White House was aiming for quick indictments and then convictions before the 2024 election in politically reliable jurisdictions, and if the convictions were overturned later, it would be after the election when it didn't matter. If so, it wouldn't matter if the prosecutors were corrupt and incompetent.

That was at best a miscalculation.

Drip, Drip, Drip

This piece at Breitbart both raises and answers some intriguing questions about Fani Willis's relationship with Nathan Wade:

Nathan Wade “made the decisions to hire or fire” employees in Fulton County District Attorney’s Office following Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis’ election victory in November 2020, multiple sources familiar with the Wade and Willis relationship exclusively told Breitbart News.

. . . Wade led a transition team of ten to twelve people who interviewed and evaluated current employees to remain in Willis’ newly won office just weeks after she won the election in November, said the sources, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retribution due to their direct knowledge of the environment inside the District Attorney’s Office, which they characterized as “corrupt.”

This corroborates the statement by former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes in his February 16 testimony that Wade was present in the 2021 meeting in which Barnes was asked if he was interested in the special prosecutor's role. Several commentators asked at the time why Wade, who hadn't yet been named special prosecutor at the time of that interview, was nevertheless present and apparently involved in personnel decisions.

The answer seems to be that from before she assumed office as Fulton County District Attorney on January 1, 2021, Wade, at least by the account of Breitbart's sources, had been some kind of unpaid consigliere to Willis. That he was in the meeting with Barnes at an unspecified date in 2021 was apparently consistent with that role. But if these sources are correct, Wade must have spent quite a bit of time on this, time that otherwise would have been billable for his law practice. One of the Breitbart sources gave an account of his involvement:

“Willis said everyone in the office was essentially all terminated, and that essentially we had to reapply for our jobs and must submit an application and schedule a time to appear for an interview,” a source said. “We had to reapply and came back in so they could interview everyone — from lawyers to paralegals to assistants to investigators.”

“And in that room, in my interview, there were a lot of people other than Fani Willis. And that was her transition team. I definitely know that Nathan Wade was in that room because he was taking the lead role,” the source stated. “And I was a little confused because I had never seen him before.”

“I had about maybe ten people in the interview,” another source described the reinterview process with Wade. “Nathan definitely was up moving around and taking charge in the room. Wade hired the entire office of 250 employees,” the person said. “I was just telling him my employment background, and they just sit there and looked at me and they said well, ‘you’ll get an email on our decision.’ And that’s what Wade said. And he looked at Willis. They looked at each other. And there was just something so weird going on.”

This environment seems consistent with the previous account of whistleblower and former Willis staffer Amanda Timpson, who confronted Willis in a November 21, 2021 meeting

after the DA’s former campaign social media manager Michael Cuffee planned to use part of a nearly $500,000 grant for travel, computers and “swag,” according to audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

“He wanted to do things with grants that were impossible, and I kept telling him, like, ‘We can’t do that,’” Timpson is heard telling Willis in the recording. “He told everybody … ‘We’re going to get MacBooks, we’re going to get swag, we’re going to use it for travel.’ I said, ‘You cannot do that, it’s a very, very specific grant.’”

. . . [O]n Jan.14, 2022, Willis fired Timpson, who oversaw the office’s juvenile diversion program, and had her escorted out of the building with seven armed investigators, the ex-employee told the Free Beacon.

In an interview with the outlet, Timpson said the purported abuse of the grant was “very similar” to Willis’ office splurging on lavish vacations with private attorney, Nathan Wade, with whom she was allegedly carrying on a “clandestine” affair.

“My case and Nathan Wade’s case are very similar when you break them down point by point,” Timpson told the outlet. “Ethical violations, abuse of power, and the misuse of county, state, and federal funds.”

The firing of Timpson also seems consistent with the accounts of Wade's earlier role of shadow personnel director, where he weeded out potentially disloyal staff. Although he was appointed special prosecutor on November 1, 2021, he seems to have continued his previous role as shadow advisor to Willis after that time. But how did he benefit from this role before November 1, 2021? One way would have been contracts from Willis'soffice to his law firm:

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis hired her alleged lover’s law partner to work for her office at a rate of $150 an hour, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation—an arrangement that is raising eyebrows among legal experts who question her spending of public funds.

Christopher Campbell, a partner at Wade & Campbell Firm, has received $126,070 from the Office of the District Attorney since 2021, according to county records. Willis hired Campbell to provide services as a “Taint Attorney,” reviewing privileged evidence beginning in Jan. 2021 at a rate of $150 an hour, contracts obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation show.

. . . Wade and Campbell’s former law partner, Terrence Bradley, has also been paid $74,480 by the District Attorney’s Office since 2021, according to county records.

Under a separate contract spanning from March 1, 2021, to April 30, 2021, Campbell was also hired to provide services as a “First Appearance Attorney” at a rate of $65 an hour, according to the document.

. . . “This is a mystery in and of itself,” Atlanta-based criminal defense attorney and legal analyst Philip Holloway told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I have no clue why any DA’s office needs to pay a private lawyer to handle ‘first appearance’ calendars. Any assistant DA could easily do that. They are already on the payroll and it is the most simple of all tasks.”

Testimony from both Wade and Bradley at the February 15-16 evidentiary hearing indicated that income to the firm was split three ways, so that the fees paid to Campbell and Bradley would also have been paid one third to Wade. This suggests that this was at least one back-channel way to funnel payments to Wade for his role in Willis's office. But there has been at least one other question about Wade's performance as an attorney:

Wade was hired by the Cobb County Sheriff’s Department in June 2020, after more than a year and a half of brutally critical media coverage about the deaths of predominantly Black inmates, including one who begged repeatedly to be sent to the hospital for nearly eight hours while struggling to breathe.

. . . [Deputy Chief] Allen wrote that she retained Wade’s law firm to review cases "that have involved alleged excessive use of force, deadly force, discrimination or neglect ... with a fine-tooth comb.”

When Wade finished his investigation later that year, he released no formal public report about what led to the deaths at the notoriously dangerous lock-up.

Asked about his findings for a local TV news investigation, Wade conceded that he created no “documents, communications, or records memorializing, reflecting evidence, or relating to the work,” according to the news station, 11Alive.

“I have obviously my brainchild, what’s going on in my mind about it. That’s what I have,” Wade told a lawyer for 11Alive who was trying to obtain Sheriff’s Department internal records about the probe through public records act requests. That outcome was condemned by local criminal justice reform activists and defense attorneys, some of whom said Wade’s investigation helped the Sheriff’s Department use the pretense of an ongoing investigation to deny public access to potentially embarrassing records.

So Wade is an interesting guy with an interesting background. Over the weekend, Congessman Jim Jordan announced that the House Judiciary Committee has been speaking with Amanda Timpson:

“We haven’t heard back from her yet — we’ll see what we get from her — but there’s a whistleblower in her office who we have talked to, our committee staff,” he said.

. . . "We'll see where it goes," Jordan added.

It looks like indeed we will. I suspect that the sources who spoke to Breitbart are close to Timpson and the House Judiciary Committee.

Let's Back Up And Look At The Big Picture

Two events over the past few days may not seem very closely related, but I think that together, they represent the collapse of the White House 2024 game plan and begin to explain the increasing dissatisfaction from Denocrats with the state of Biden's campaign. The events are the release of Nathan Wade's phone tracking data and Nikki Haley's 20-point-plus loss to Donald Trump in her home state primary.

The central point of the White House reelection plan was recognizing that Joe Biden isn't a good candidate. He wasn't good in 2020, but they were able to use COVID to keep him off the campaign trail, and they were somehow able either to keep him sober or medicate him effectively before the debates, so that he beat the limited expectations for his debate performance, in that he didn't garble the names of world leaders or whatever, as he has routinely been doing more recently.

So the plan as of the middle of last year was to hobble Trump's campaign performance by putting him on trial, in particular by starting the January 6 federal trial in Washington by March 5, the day before the Super Tuesday primaries. Then, although no firm date had been set for the classified documents trial in Florida or the Fulton County RICO trial, both were expected to get under way by May, putting them at the end of the primary season and before the convention.

It was apparently expected, especially if the trials could provide explosive testimony from former Trumpers who'd copped guilty pleas, that these would heavily damage Trump's prospects in the primaries and help candidates like Nikki Haley, whom the Democrats apparently felt would be easier for Biden to beat in the general election.

Haley's own campaign strategy has in fact dovetailed with these expectations.

Nikki Haley’s recent comments suggest that she sees a sweet spot for her campaign as former President Donald Trump’s legal drama intensifies – and potentially results in a criminal conviction – in the coming months.

“Just wait, just wait. March, April, May, June,” the former South Carolina governor said on Wednesday when asked about Trump’s support typically strengthening when he shows up in court. “When you see this and he is completely distracted and the American people are worried about the $34 trillion in debt, they are worried that their kids can’t read. … They are worried about wars around the world and he is talking about how he is victim.”

While Haley predicts that support for Trump will drop off in the coming months as he spends more time in the courtroom, she has also made the case that voters will not support Trump if he is criminally convicted.

The problem is that Trump's legal drama isn't intensifying, it's degenerating into farce. One YouTube commentator compares the Willis-Wade revelations to the Jussie Smollett case, with its enduring images of hired bodybuilders wearing MAGA hats and phony nooses, but Willis-Wade will likely prove more archeypal and damaging to the lawfare campaign. The CNN link continues,

“Now he has three judgments against him. He’s going to be in court March and April, May and June. He has said himself he is going to spend more time in a courtroom than he is on the campaign trail. And so he’s been on a rant about what a victim he is,” Haley told supporters at a campaign event in her home state of South Carolina on Wednesday.

So if this was Haley's expectation only a few days ago, it's been overtaken by events. The Washington January 6 federal trial is on indefinite hold pending appeals to the US Supreme Court. The Fulton County case, if it survives dismissal following Judge McAfee's decision, probably can't now be tried this year, and those who'd pled guilty, possibly in anticipation of providing testimony for the prosecution, will likely withdraw their pleas. The Florida classified documents case, which might have begun in May, is likely to be delayed by Trump's latest motions, which will be appealed if the trial court denies them.

The only other pending case is the Alvin Bragg Stormy Daniels hush money case in New York, which the electorate is likely to treat as a joke, just as it treated the two earlier New York cases. It's understoiod, in fact, that those cases simply drove Trump upward in the polls. Any criminal conviction for Trump before the election is highly unlikely, and it's in fact less likely that any of the cases outside New York can come to trial before the election at all.

Most recently, Haley has been claiming that although she doesn't win majorities, she does get 40% of the primary vote. One problem with that claim is that many of those votes are from crossover Democrats hoping to boost her chances in the November election. A second issue that I think may emerge is related to the Kari Lake scandal last month in Arizona:

Arizona Republican Party Chairman Jeff DeWit resigned Wednesday following the release of an audio tape in which he allegedly tried to bribe GOP firebrand Kari Lake not to run for Senate, as the controversial Lake mounts another campaign for office in the state.

. . . “There are very powerful people who want to keep you out,” DeWit can be heard saying in the recording, reportedly taken at Lake’s home in March 2023, before asking Lake for a “number.”

DeWit explained in the tape that the “powerful people” wanted to make way for a new party standard bearer.

So are those same powerful people bankrolling Nikki Haley's continued Quixotic campaign to beat Trump? This may well be exposed in coming weeks; it's generally assumed that she's running with unstated Democrat support.

Plan A is rapidly being overtaken by events, and there's no Plan B. Whatever develops in coming months, the lawfare campaign isn't working, and that's going to thwart any plan to make anyone but Trump the nominee. Meanwhile, the likelihood that Biden won't be able to undertake a strenuous reelection campaign increases.

Maybe Not Such A Surprise

The big news yesterday was a "twist" in the Wade-Willis affair that came from "new evidence":

Phone records, recently unveiled in new court documents obtained by The Post, indicate a pattern of late-night visits by Wade to Willis’s apartment, raising questions about the timeline of their relationship.

According to the cellphone data presented in court, Wade frequented the vicinity of Fulton County District Attorney Willis’s condo in Hapeville at least 35 times before their confessed affair.

. . . Investigator Charles Mittelstadt, in his report to Fulton County Superior Court, emphasized the sheer volume of evidence. He highlighted two specific dates that caught his attention, revealing Wade’s presence near Willis’s apartment in September 2021 until the wee hours of the morning, followed by a late-night rendezvous in November of the same year.

. . . Mittelstadt highlighted times that refuted both Wade’s and Willis’s testimony that they had not begun a relationship prior to November 2021, and that he had only visited the apartment on occasion to discuss business.

“I was directed into a deeper analysis on two specific dates: September 11-12, 2021 (before I understand Mr Wade was hired) and November 29-30 (prior to what I understand was the in-court testimony that the romantic relationship began in 2022).

“Specifically, on September 11, 2021, Mr Wade’s phone left the Doraville area and arrived within the geoface located on the Dogwood address at 10.45pm,” Mittelstadt said.

“The phone remained there until September 12 at 3.28am at which time the phone traveled directly to towers located in East Cobb consistent with his routine pinging at his residence in the area. The phone arrived in East Cobb at approximately 4.05am, and records demonstrate he sent a text at 4.20am to Ms Willis.

This is juicy enough, but Megyn Kelly in the YouTube podcast below cites specific questions by Michael Roman's and Donald Trump's lawyers during last weeks's evidentiary hearing that strongly suggest the defense was fully aware of this information as of then.

At 7:29:

Mr Wade: Have gone to condo in Hapeville, yes ma'am

Ms Merchant: So you have gone to a condo with Ms Willis in Hapeville.

Mr Wade: I have.

Ms Merchant: Have you spent the night there.

Mr Wade: Never.

Ms Merchant: Never spent the night.

At 7:42:

Ms Merchant: Did Mr Wade ever visit you at the condo that you leased from Ms Yeartie?

Ms Willis: He visited that condo.

Ms Merchant: He visited that condo.

Ms Willis: Yes, he did.

Ms Merchant: Did he ever spend the night at that condo?

Ms Willis: No.

Ms Merchant: Just visited.

Ms Willis: Yeah, but he did visit for sure.

Kelly's podcast then moves to Trump's attorney Steven Sadow's examination of Ms Willis. At 8:00:

Mr Sadow: Did anyone else stay with you at the Yeartie condo, including Ms Yeartie?

Ms Willis: Never. Ms Yeartie never lived in the condo --

Mr Sadow: My word was "stayed", not "lived", "stayed". "Stayed" with you at the condo.

Ms Willis: I guess I don't understand the distinction, but no one ever -- I think my baby, my oldest child, I think she spent one night with me, maybe my oldest and my youngest, but I think that whole time I was in that place, other than that one night I don't think anyone ever, um, there was a very lonely period in my time, life, I don't think anyone ever spent the night other than maybe one night.

As a true crime fan, I know that someone who goes out of their way to provide extra-complete, extra-helpful information that has nothing to do with the question is lying.

At 11:12, Kelly comments, "[Merchant and Sadow] very clearly had these records when they were asking Fanny and Nathan questions last Friday, and now, knowing what we know from this affadavit and these phone records,it's very interesting to watch the testimony, becuase Nathan knows, Fanny knows, they know what the truth is, and watch them dance on these questions." At 11:46:

Mr Sadow: Can you give us an approximation of how many times Mr Wade visited you at the condo between the time you moved in and prior to November 1 of [2021]?

Ms Willis: I don't think often, but I don't want to speculate.

Mr Sadow: Can we say more than five? More than ten?

Ms Willis: I'm gonna tell you the problem I'm having here. Let's ay more than ten, but I'm not sure that's even accurate . . . I don't remember him being in that condo a lot.

At 12:57:

Mr Sadow: Your answer is, yes, prior to November 1 of 2021, you would have gone to the Hapeville condo and been there with Ms Willis, correct?

Mr Wade: Yes.

Mr Sadow: And you would have been there, as you indicated, for many reasons, right?

Mr Wade: Yes.

Mr Sadow: Can you give me, just list a few of the reasons.

Mr Wade: Ms Yeartie resided there, went to visit her, um, maybe went to talk about, uh, a document that I received, um --

Mr Sadow: You would go to the condo to talk about a document that you received?

Mr Wade: Absolutely.

Mr Sadow: Any other reasons?

Mr Wade: None come to mind.

Mr Sadlow: None come to mind.

Mr Wade No sir.

Mr Sadow: And would you say that was frequent? When I say "frequent", do you think prior to November 1 of 2021, you were at the condo more than ten times?

Mr Wade: No sir.

Mr Sadow: So it would be less than ten times.

Mr Wade: Yes sir

Mr Sadow: So if phone records were to reflect that you were making phone calls from the same location as the condo, before November 1 of 2021, and it was on multiple occasions, the phone records would be wrong?

Mr Wade: If phone records reflected that, yes sir.

Mr Sadow: They'd be wrong.

Mr Wade: They'd be wrong.

In hindsight, given these specific lines of questioning from both Ms Merchant and Mr Sadow, it's clear that they both were aware of the Mittelstadt geofencing evidence prior to last week's hearing and were basing their questions on it. In fact, it'ss hard to avoid thinking both Willis and Wade had some sense that the defense had evidence that contradicted their tesimony, whether it was from Ms Yeartie, Mr Bradley, or some other source like phone records, which Mr Sadow mentioned specifically in his questions to Mr Wade.

I can't avoid thinking more is going on behind the scenes. But as of yesterday,

A Fulton County judge will hear arguments on March 1 over efforts to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis from Georgia's 2020 election interference case against former President Trump.

In addition,

On Friday, McAfee also denied a motion by Wade to block his divorce attorney and former law partner, Terrence Bradley, from appearing before the judge to review potentially privileged communications Bradley allegedly made about Wade and Willis’s relationship, according to three sources familiar with the matter. An order does not yet appear on the public docket.

McAfee has called for Bradley and his lawyer to appear at the Fulton County courthouse on Monday at 1:30 p.m. ET for the so-called in camera review that’s conducted in the judge’s chambers, the sources said.

So far, McAfee hasn't been ruling in favor of the DA's office. We'll have to see what else comes out.

Trump Is Working To Put The Lawfare Strategy Out Of Reach

It quietly got into the news yesterday that, although Judge McAfee had spoken vaguely last Friday about having closing arguments in the evidentiary hearing on DA Willis's disqualification possibly today, this has been postponed:

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ office has confirmed no closing summations will be held this week in her disqualification hearing regarding her historic prosecution of the nation’s 45th president.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee is currently deciding whether Willis and her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade, should be disqualified from further participating in their indictment of former President Donald Trump.

While many observers would like to see Willis get her comeuppance, the best we can say is this will take a while. In the video just above, Jordan Sekulow of the American Center for Law & Justice says, starting at 2:14,

[Judge McAfee]'s going to admit closing arguments. This is not normal. Something that we definitely thought would be done by this week is now going to go into a full third week. . . . Is it unprecedented to go into Week 3?

His interlocutor, a former federal prosecutor whose name I couldn't decipher, answers,

I think it is, when you're talking about a disqualification of a prosecutor from pursuing their duties, to criminally prosecute crimes in Fulton County or anywhere, you would think that something like this would be decided rather quickly. You put up your evidence, and within hours, the other side puts up their evidence as to why the DA should stay in the case, and the judge usually makes a ruling, either from the bench or within a day or two. But this has just strung on and on, and it's because Trump is involved, and it changes the complexion of everything.

He continues at 13:45:

The longer he takes, the more I think that shows that he's gonna disqualify her, because he's really gonna have to justify in a lengthy legal written opinion as to why -- and then of course, Jordan, each side is going to be entitled to ask the judge for a certificate of immediate review. . . . The losing side can say, "Judge, let this thing be decided by the court of appeals. . . . The judge doesn't have to give a certificate of immediate review, but Judge McAfee is going to be happy to get it out of his court.

He concludes at 14:45:

I don't think the case is going to be tried this year, because if the court of appeals were to decide to take the case, then they would have another briefing schedule, then they would have the possibility of oral argument before a three-judge panel of the Georgia Court of Appeals, and it would go on and on and on, and you know what, Jordan, in addition, the losing side could seek certiorari to the Georgia State Supreme Court. . . . So the idea of the defense, and I think they're doing it brilliantly, is to drag it out. Drag it out forever.

But this is just the Fulton County RICO case. Trump has already taken a presidential immunity claim in the January 6 case with Judge Chutkan to the US Supreme Court, and he's now going to raise it in the classified documents case as well:

Donald Trump’s attorneys said late Thursday that the former president should never have been charged in Florida with illegally retaining classified materials because he designated them as personal documents before leaving office — and thus should be shielded from prosecution by presidential immunity.

It is the second time Trump has tried to avoid a federal criminal trial with the sweeping argument that he cannot be prosecuted for actions that occurred while he was president. A judge and an appeals court panel have rejected that claim in his Washington, D.C., trial for allegedly obstructing the 2020 election results, but Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

The Supreme Court’s decision could settle the question of presidential immunity in both the D.C. and Florida cases.

The immunity court filing Thursday night was one of least a half dozen requests by Trump’s attorneys in Florida to toss out the 40-count indictment, which accuses Trump of mishandling classified papers after he left office and obstructing government efforts to retrieve them. Trump has pleaded not guilty.

However, Trump has also moved that Jack Smith was improperly appointed as special prosecutor:

Former President Donald Trump has argued that Special Counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed to the position while trying to dismiss the classified documents case.

Trump's lawyers filed a series of motions on Thursday attempting to throw out the federal case. The former president has pleaded not guilty to 40 charges over allegations he illegally retained classified materials after he left office in January 2021, then obstructed the federal attempt to retrieve them.

. . . One of the filings also argued that Attorney General Merrick Garland's appointment of Smith in November 2022 was unlawful as it was not first approved by the Senate. This is required by the Appointments Clause and the Appropriations Clause; a previous argument had raised the "serious problem," the filing added.

These filings increase the likelihood that neither federal case against Trump can come to trial before the election, now less than nine months away. But a felony conviction for Trump before the election has been a keynote both of the White House lawfare strategy, and increasingly a last-ditch justification for Nikki Haley's campaign:

Nikki Haley’s recent comments suggest that she sees a sweet spot for her campaign as former President Donald Trump’s legal drama intensifies – and potentially results in a criminal conviction – in the coming months.

. . . While Haley predicts that support for Trump will drop off in the coming months as he spends more time in the courtroom, she has also made the case that voters will not support Trump if he is criminally convicted.

“There is no way that the American people are going to vote for a convicted criminal. They’re not,” Haley said last week in an interview with NBC News. Trump has pleaded not guilty in all the cases against him.

Haley has long said that Trump would not be able to focus on a general election or beat President Joe Biden in large part because he is going to be spending so much time in court. Now she is also making the case that support for him could wane even before the GOP convention.

The problem is that Trump's counter strategy will simply be to delay the proceedings for a mere matter of months, which also covers the US Supreme Court's summer recess from late June/early July until the first Monday in October, which subtracts another three months from the schedule. Trump's current motions hope to get the court to take his appeals, but simply waiting for the court to decide whether or not to hear them is a problem for the prosecution, which has repeatedly claimed that it's urgent that they go to trial before the election.

It's puzzling that nobdy in the White House seems to have anticipated that Trump's attorneys would seek to delay any trials, since this strategy has been characterized as "criminal defense 101", instead waiting until 2023 even to issue indictments.

In Your Dreams

A piece by Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect argues The Drumbeat for Biden to Step Aside Will Only Grow Louder.

If Biden were to announce that he is stepping aside, the effort to influence the nomination would take the form of organizing to select who is to be chosen as the delegates. Biden will have won most if not all primaries, but the individuals selected to serve as actual delegates will not be chosen for several more weeks or months, and the role of delegate will be up for grabs.

. . . In other words, the immediate consequence would be a series of late quasi-primaries in all states. At the convention itself, with multiple hats in the ring, it is very unlikely that the nominee would be chosen on the first ballot. That’s where the smoke-filled room part comes in. As in the old days, there would be a lot of deliberation and horse trading between ballots to come up with a ticket that can win.

. . . What about the tricky issue of Kamala Harris? In stepping aside, Biden might just throw it open. Or he might urge the convention to select Harris.

But either way, it’s hard to imagine a multi-ballot process choosing Harris, since the delgates above all want to win. And it would take some of the sting out of her being denied the nomination if she fails to prevail in a legitimate process, especially if the nominee for president or vice president were African American.

It may be that this is all wishful. A brokered convention might be perceived as elite and undemocratic. After late-night dealmaking, it might not pick the strongest nominee.

He concludes,

Quite apart from what we think, the calls for Biden to step aside have taken on a life of their own. They will be all over the talk shows and social media, and the drumbeat will only grow louder as Biden invetably keeps making verbal slips.

The advantage of a fresh face, say a Whitmer-Warnock ticket, is that most of Biden’s liabilities disappear. Gretchen Whitmer is 52; Trump at 77 becomes the geezer. It isn’t Whitmer’s inflation, or Whitmer’s Israel policy, or Whitmer’s verbal gaffes. Unlike Hillary Clinton in 2016, who appeared cowed by Trump’s looming presence, Whitmer is terrific at standing up to bullies, as well as delivering for working-class voters. But would she be the nominee?

This strikes me as unreal. A Whitmer-Warnock ticket would be dumped on the electorate following the convention in late August, with neither having participated in any primary contest. The primaries are critical in giving candidates the practice they need to campaign on a national stage, polish their public profiles, build a sense of momentum, and deal with potentially hostile media. Both Whitmer and Warnock have baggage, Whitmer for her strict lockdown policies during COVID and Warnock as a Christian pastor hypocritically evicting low-income tenants from apartments he controls.

Current polling has Trump performing better against Harris, Newsom, or Whitmer than he does against Biden:

In a hypothetical match-up, Trump leads Vice President Harris 46 percent to 43 percent and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) 46 percent to 36 percent. He also leads Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) 45 percent to 33 percent.

Newsom and Whitmer have increasingly gained national attention as prominent Democrats, and pundits have included them as possible future presidential candidates.

And Harris has been running her own campaign either to stay on the ticket as vice presidential nominee or to replace Joe in a contingency:

More than two dozen sources tell CNN that Harris has been gathering information to help her penetrate what she sometimes refers to as the “bubble” of Biden campaign thinking, telling people she’s aiming to use that intelligence to push for changes in strategy and tactics that she hopes will put the ticket in better shape to win.

Multiple leading Democrats, anxious about a campaign they fear might be stumbling past a point of no return, say their conversations with Harris have been a surprising and welcome change, after months of feeling sloughed off by the White House and Biden campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.

. . . But Republican forces have been capitalizing on her low approval numbers and Joe Biden’s advanced age by making the 2024 campaign more about Harris and the chance she could become president, especially as questions about the president’s mental acuity continue to define his own candidacy.

And in any case, Ed Kilgore argues at Intelligencer, Replacing Biden at the Convention Is Risky and Unprecedented:

[A] nominee chosen not by primary voters or by a consensus of party leaders is just as likely to produce a calamitous general-election campaign as some burst of enthusiasm among united partisans. The last multi-ballot Democratic convention nominated Adlai Stevenson in 1952. He lost. The last multi-ballot Republican convention chose Thomas Dewey in 1944. He lost.

. . . The 2024 Democratic convention will end on August 22 (assuming it doesn’t go into overtime like the 1924 affair), leaving ten weeks before the general election on November 5. Would a Democratic Party fresh from an “open convention” be able get its act together in that span of time, particularly if the nominee is someone other than a universally known figure?

I’m interested in learning more about “open convention” scenarios. But at first blush it seems a far riskier proposition for Democrats than just going with the incumbent president of the United States, the man who was left for dead as a presidential candidate in 2020 more times than you could count.

Right now, the problem for Democrats is that Plan A is increasingly shaky, but there's no Plan B at all.

Trump Already Shapes Events

It's generally recognized that Trump played a large part in killing the border security deal, with the AP calling it a "sudden, stunning collapse publicly engineered by Trump". It looks like more is in the works:

Former President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he was uncertain if he could work with former ally turned political foe Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell if he were to be re-elected as president.

“He’ll probably end up endorsing me. I don’t know that I can work with him,” Trump said during a town hall on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" on Tuesday. “He gave away trillions of dollars that he didn’t have to, trillions of dollars. He made it very easy for the Democrats.”

Clearly Trump is on the side of senators who already oppose McConnell:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and pro-Ukraine hawks within his conference gave away their leverage by voting to send billions more in aid to Ukraine despite not reaching a border security deal, several Republican senators who are increasingly frustrated with party leadership told the Daily Caller.

Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee and Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott all unloaded on McConnell in interviews with the Daily Caller and shared their gratitude for Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who said any Ukraine aid without border provisions will be “dead on arrival” in the House.

It seems to me that what's happening is that Trump, in military terms, is working to shape the battlefield for the general election campaign, and if anything, he means to make changes in the Republican legislative branch as well. The Daily Caller story observes farther down,

Republican leadership’s alleged prioritization of Ukraine over the southern border could come back to haunt them with voters, if polls are to be believed. Immigration consistently rates as a top issue for all Americans, especially Republicans — the same can’t be said for additional aid to Ukraine.

“[Ukraine] does not register. It is not something they think about . . . I would tell you right now, it’s probably up there with, I wanna say it ranked just above climate change, and climate change was really low,” Republican pollster and founder of the Trafalgar Group, Robert Cahaly, said of where Ukraine ranks among priorities for 2024 voters.

. . . Lee said a frustrated electorate could be what saves Republican senators from themselves, along with opposition in the House: “The two most effective tools we have moving forward are a GOP House majority that will actually fight for our priorities, and a very angry electorate who are tired of being thrown under the bus by their supposedly Republican elected officials.”

Meanwhile, Joe is still following last year's campaign script, claiming the Republicans are against fixing the border and denouncing them for not supporting Ukraine:

You may have heard some call into question the sanctity of America's commitment to our Allies.

That's not who we are.

We're a nation that can be relied on, that stands up to Putin. Let's prove it by passing the bipartisan National Security Bill so I can sign it into law. pic.twitter.com/BYXU1lwnkh

— President Biden (@POTUS) February 20, 2024

Except that the subtext the audience on X is picking up is that Joe needed a dozen takes to get something that could be edited into a coherent speech. This fits one of the main current issues in the campaign, Biden's age and condition; it puts him on the wrong side of the border issue, and it has him wasting time on Ukraine, an issue well down on voters' list of concerns.

I get the impression that Trump is thinking several months ahead of everyone else. He's already put the nomination out of reach, while the real proxy campaign right now is in the courts, where he's had the edge since the first indictments last year: each one drove him higher in the polls, and he's currently wiping the floor with proxy candidate Fani Willis.

I also suspect his contingency planning has already encompassed the likelihood of Biden withdrawing as a candidate.

Realism From Nate Silver

In a remarkably long and insightful essay, Nate Silver writes It's time for the White House to put up or shut up.

[E]ven the most optimistic Democrats, if you read between the lines, are really arguing that Democrats could win despite Biden and not because of him. Biden is probably a below-replacement-level candidate at this point because Americans have a lot of extremely rational concerns about the prospect of a Commander-in-Chief who would be 86 years old by the end of his second term. It is entirely reasonable to see this as disqualifying. The fact that Trump also has a number of disqualifying features is not a good reason to nominate Biden. It is a reason for Democrats to be the adults in the room and acknowledge that someone who can't sit through a Super Bowl interview isn't someone the public can trust to have the physical and mental stamina to handle an international crisis, terrorist attack or some other unforseen threat when he'll be in his mid-80s.

Biden has had two truly awful weeks, starting with the Hur report and his failed attempt to refute it by giving a focused press conference, followed by the Fani Willis sideshow that made it plain yet again that Biden's main reelection strategy, obtaining one or more criminal convictions for Trump before the election, is faltering. Silver has serious doubts Biden can turn this around.

A lot of commentators that I respect have pointed out that Biden ought to do more public events that would help to allay public doubts about his mental sharpness. The problem is, one can infer the reason that Biden is not doing them — namely that the White House comms team is rational and has inferred that the cost of doing them outweighs the benefits because Biden is too likely to come across poorly.

Let’s abstract this for a moment. Say that, in any given period of time — maybe over the course of a couple months — Biden has 20 opportunities to do what you might call Improvisational Public Appearances (IPAs). We can define these as events where Biden is not merely making pre-scripted remarks and instead faces sustained questioning from the media, voters or other public figures.

. . . It’s also why the press conference from two weeks ago was worrying. This was an IPA that Biden basically couldn’t avoid. You can’t respond to your own Justice Department’s claim that your memory is failing by not saying anything at all. And yet when forced to make this appearance, Biden’s performance was poor.

Silver offers this prescription if Biden does actually want to turn things around:

Over the course of the next several weeks, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives.

. . . This really isn't too much to ask. These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done. I admit that I'm asking Biden to pack in several in a row, but he has to make up for lost time. And the timing is urgent because he and his inner circle have to make sure that he's really up for a second term and that this is the best option for Democrats. If Biden was willing to take five hours to speak with Hur, he ought to to take five hours for this. And if he can't, it's awfully audacious to ask Americans to make him president for another four years.

Except that this is almost certainly too much to ask, and Silver basically knows this. He doesn't even mention the upcoming State of the Union speech; I suspect it will be hard for Joe to last an hour without stumbling, slurring, hypercorrecting, and misspeaking. It's hard to avoid thinking Joe is basically checked out and working a minimal schedule. He's being enabled and protected by his staff and, apparently, his wife:

Douglas Brinkley, author of “The Unfinished Presidency,” told CBS News’ “Face The Nation” on Sunday that Jill Biden has done the exact opposite of what other first ladies have done.

He noted that both former Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson decided to leave office because their wives told them they didn’t want to serve a second term.

. . . “That’s not the case with Jill Biden. She likes power. She wants to stay. She wants some sense of revenge,” he continued. “She teaches in Virginia Community College. This milieu around our building here, this is her home. And the idea of relinquishing it all after you’ve taken the slings and arrows of the last years of attacks, and at the last minute, just when you get all the delegates you’re going to say, I’m going to open it up to a bunch of people — it’s very childish when you read those kind of reports.”

So the narrative is beginning to change. People like Nate Silver and Ezra Klein are saying Joe should step aside. Klein says,

This is the question Democrats keep wanting to answer, the question the Biden administration keeps pretending only to hear: Can Biden do the job of president? But that is not the question of the 2024 campaign. The insistence that Biden is capable of being president is being used to shut down discussion of whether he’s capable of running for president.

. . . We had to wait till this year — till now, really — to see Biden even begin to show what he’d be like on the campaign trail. And what I think we’re seeing is that he is not up for this. He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago.

. . . That was why that news conference mattered. That news conference had a point. It had a purpose. The purpose was to reassure voters of Biden’s cognitive fitness, particularly his memory. And Biden couldn’t do that, not for one night, not for fewer than 15 minutes.

. . . So yes, I think Biden, as painful as this is, should find his way to stepping down as a hero. That the party should help him find his way to that, to being the thing he said he would be in 2020, the bridge to the next generation of Democrats.

Klein concludes that since it's too late for a primary campaign, the Democrats should work it all out at the convention, which is basically just a way of saying there's no Plan B, except that Plan A just isn't going to work.

The Incompetence Problem And The Assassinate Hitler Conundrum

Michael Lebron, a YouTube commentator who goes by the name Lionel, brought into focus a key question that hadn't been fully formed at the back of my mind. I kept returning to the puzzle that Winston Churchill and British intelligence pondered during World War II: was it worth going in to assassinate Hitler? Apparently they concluded not, because there was a chance that if they succeeded, the Germans might replace him with a comptent general and change the whole calculation.

Lionel raises this question over the Trump strategy, which so far has endorsed his co-defendant Michael Roman's motion via his counsel Ashleigh Merchant to disqualify Fulton County DA Fani Willis for conflict of interest. Lionel raises this assassinate-Hitler coundrum at 16:52:

Let's say you represent Donald Trump. And you're saying, let's assume, that Fani Willis is involved in some kind of behavior. How does this affect, negatively, Donald Trump? Well, the first question you've gotta ask is very simply this: who is Mr Wade? It appears that there may be a conflict of interest here regarding prosecutors. Now, that may or may not affect this case. Now remember, the bottom line is this, and I want you to be very, very, very very careful I want you to understand something.

How does this affect Donald Trump? This is not a bar grievance. This is not an ethical grievance. This is not a trial about her per se or her sex life or her love life or her financials. The question is should she, or really, her office, be disqualified for what is being said. She apparently hired her lover -- level number one -- hired her lover -- which, OK -- incompetent -- OK -- remember, how does this affect Donald Trump?

May I stop right now? Do you understand something? That this might be -- let me rephrase this. I might want to ask Donald Trump, "Now listen. This might be the best thing you've ever had going for you. They're going to end up giving this case to somebody else. Do you want a good prosecutor, or do you want Fani Willis?

"Because what you're doing now, what you're basically doing, believe it or not, you're saying, hey, we want a new prosecutor. You sure about this? You sure. You've got some of the most incompetent people handling one of the most complicated cases, a racketeering case, predicate acts, and to be able to explain it -- nobody wants this piece of dog crap, nobody wants it. So, President Trump, you sure about this?"

I reflected on this at some length, especially because Lionel helped me clarify my internal version of the assassinate-Hitler conundrum as it applies to this case. The first reply I have is that the strategy of moving to disqualify Willis wasn't Trump's, it was Ashleigh Merchant's on behalf of her client, Michael Roman. Trump's attorneys joined the strategy some days later after presumably reviewing how this did affect Trump.

My second reply is that Trump, his political advisors, and his attorneys appear to be well settled on a strategy of delaying the most important cases until after the election, while leveraging the joke cases -- basically the New York civil and criminal trials -- to his advantage when they go against him, by playing to the free news coverage and the bizarre public personae of his judges and accusers. Yes, the cases can be appealed, but that's down the road, after the election.

I suspect Trump's original strategy had all along been to treat the Fulton County case the same way as the New York cases, using Fani Willis as a foil equivalent to Letitia James, E Jean Carroll, and Judge Engeron. Recall that the Fulton County case was the origin of the famous Trump mugshot.

The Ashleigh Merchant strategy of moving to disqualify Willis came out of the blue, and as far as it affects Trump, it's entirely serendipitous. His primary strategy in all the cases has been, insofar as possible, to delay them until after the election. Lionel thinks it might be a bad strategy in effect to ask for a new prosecutor, but this wasn't Trump's initial idea, and even if Judge McAfee removes Willis and puts the wheels in motion to name a new prosecutor, this won't be a quick process.

And as Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, the defendants who'd originally pleaded guilty will likely withdraw their guilty pleas, which will set a new prosecutor back, but it's by no means certain that a new prosecutor can be found who'd take the case, and it could well be prosecuted in a friendlier county. The balance of uncertainties probably favors Trump -- but he's scored two short-term successes. First, he's created yet another highly effective foil with Fani Willis, who's played into Trump's hands in her testimony. Second, he's unquestionably begun an indefinite process of delaying that trial, which is and has been his overriding objective irrespective of the prosecutor.

As they say, it's better to be lucky than good. A lot of commentators expect Trump just to be good, which he's never been.

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.

Day 1

The evidentiary hearing on the ethical conflicts between Fulton County DA Fani Willis and her lead prosecutor is turning out to be the best TV since Watergate. Fani Willis is comparable to combative figures like John Ehrlichman, Charles Colson, or Jeb Stuart Magruder. Nathan Wade, whose habitual expressions all involve something sheepish, is a clown equivalent to G Gordon Liddy.

A lot of Fox commentators have focused on Judge McAfee indulging Willis, but some YouTubers like Robert Gouveia and Viva Frei think Ashleigh Merchant has deliberately been setting Ms Willis up to go on embarrassing, rambling, often hysterical rants. And if this is deliberate, the judge is effectively enabling it.

So far, the case reinforces my impression of the astonishing incompetence of the people behind the White House lawfare stratagy. One of the obvious questions to come out of yestefday's testimony was how Willis and Wade could manage trial preparations if they took five vacations in six months. Another was the cavalier estmates of what these vacations cost -- each cruise or trip to someplace like Napa, CA amounted to charges of less than $2000 on Wade's part, with Willis testifying she'd reimbursed Wade in cash amounts from $500 to $2500.

But this goes to the complete absence of receipts, with other testimony that's simply hard to believe, such as Willis's insistence that she doesn't use checks. Does she pay her mortgage in cash? Her car insurance? Het utilities?

But round trip air fare, for instance from Atlanta to Sacramento, which is the closest airport for Napa, is at least $200 per person. Hotels are at least $300 per night. Wine tasting tours, of which Willis testified they took three, are at least $100 per person. Meals, airport limo, and other incidentals are probably $100-$300 per person per day. We don't know how many days they stayed, but an estimate of $2000 for the two of them on such a trip seems unreasonably low, especially considering the likelihood that they preferred higher-level accommodations.

So the show is ongoing, we'll have to see how things shake out. The current prognostication seems to be that she will be disqualified as prosecutor, but there are other estimates that both she and Wade could find themselves in tax difficulties as well.

More Questions About The Lawfare Strategy

I posted yet again yesterday about my reservations on the White House Lawfare strategy over Trump and the 2024 election, if for no other reason than timing. The plan, as best we can tell, was to indict Trump on several highly complex cases in mid-2023 with the aim of bringing him to trial, ideally with convictions, before the 2024 general election. In fact, the Fulton County RICO case was to start on March 4, the day before the Super Tuesday primaries.

A new report gives more insight into the White House's apparent intent in timing the indictments.

The first indictment [the New York Stormy Daniels case] occurred on April 4, 2023. . . .

On March 17, 2023, Bragg asked for a meeting with federal law enforcement ahead of the Trump indictment Trump, a court source told Fox News. A year earlier, Bragg’s office hired a former senior Department of Justice (DOJ) official Matthew Colangelo, who spent years targeting Trump at the Justice Department. He also attacked Trump in his role in the New York Attorney General’s office.

The second indictment was the Florida federal classified documents case:

Smith filed the second indictment on June 8, 2023. . . .

Months prior, in March, a member of Biden’s counsel’s office met with a top member of Smith’s team, just nine weeks before he indicted Trump in the classified document case, Breitbart News reported.

The third case is the Fulton County RICO case:

Willis filed the third indictment against Trump on August 14, 2023. The official court website of Fulton County, Georgia, published what appeared to be an indictment against Trump before deleting it.

Months before the indictment, Willis’ top county prosecutor met twice with Biden’s White House counsel on May 23 and November 18, 2022, a year before Trump’s August indictment, Breitbart News reported.

The Breitbart report has no information on any White House meetings prior to the fourth indictment, the District of Columbia federal January 6 case, although Jack Smith is the prosecutor in both federal cases.

What strikes me is how little thought, planning, or coordination seems actually to have taken place in the White House regarding these cases. In particular, the ability of any defense to delay any trial, much less highly complex cases of first impression involving issues like presidential immunity on which higher courts have never ruled, makes these proposed schedules absurdly short.

The Breitbart report takes the position that these meetings were improper, but proper or not, they seem to reflect rank incompetence among both White House counsel and the prosecutors in planning out how quickly these cases would proceed and the various appeals, contingencies, and opportunities for delay available to the defense.

The most advance planning that seems to have taken place between White House meeting and indictment in the cases above is the Fulton County RICO case, from May 2022 and August 2023, a little over a year -- but the prosecutor who did the meetings was Nathan Wade, the least experienced of any, and his case is quickly collapsing as we speak.

The federal cases, although they aren't collapsing quite as decisively as the Fulton County case, seem likely to be delayed past their intended schedules. Jack Smith is insisting in the appeals of both cases that the dalays are damaging the government's case:

Smith said Trump’s emergency appeal of the D.C. Circuit’s decision “fails for two interrelated reasons.”

First, Trump “cannot show the requisite likelihood that this Court would reverse the judgment and sustain his extraordinary claim of absolute immunity; and, second, the serious harm to the government — and to the public — of postponing the resolution of the criminal charges against applicant outweighs any equities he can assert to preclude further pre-trial proceedings while he seeks certiorari,” Smith wrote.

I'm having a harder and harder time thinking the lawfare strategy was ever carefully thought out, and the increasing desperation from Jack Smith to keep the slapdash preparations on track strongly suggests this.

And it's hard for me to imagine a lawyer with any sort of experience who wouldn't anticipate Trump's motions to delay the trials.

Indeed, given that, what sort of advice might such a lawyer give his client on the potential schedule for bringing the matter to trial? It looks to me as if the White House simply expected Trump and his attorneys to roll over and cooperate with the schedule they came up with on a truly slapdash and overoptimistic basis.