In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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. ...

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...

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...

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 in...

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 performanc...

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...

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...

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, ...

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 ...

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...

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 y...

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 attor...

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. ...

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...