In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Conventional wisdom is very slowly coming to accept that Plan A, securing a conviction in a Trump trial before the election, has effectively disappeared: whatever the outcome of Judge McAfee's decision in the Fulton County RICO case against Trump and his co-defendants, the losing side will appeal. The most conservative prognostications are that the judge will disqualify Wade, the special prosecutor, but not Willis, who would keep her position as DA, but she'd need to find someone new to serve as special prosecutor. That could be a problem, since Wade had been baked into the process from the start. A second contract prosecutor on the case, Anna Cross, disappeared from the proceedings for unkown reasons after attacking Terrence Bradley on February 16, when it had been assumed she would continue in a lead role. Instead, Adam Abbate, an assistant DA on the regular payroll, was called up from the secnd team to represent the DA's office in Ms Cross's absence; his performa...

In my post on Tuesday, I offered an overall theory of the Willis-Wade case that tries to account for some of the inconsistencies I see. Willis and Wade were runnng a grift, but if they were the grifters, who was the griftee? By consensus, neither Willis nor Wade is particularly intelligent, and they aren't self-starters. They basically do what they're told, as long as cooperation has rewards, although they seem to settle for fairly pedestrian levels of grift -- a wine tasting tour in Napa, or a trip to Panama City Beach on the redneck riviera, for instance. But who gave them the initial project of prosecuting Trump and something like 18 codefendants, using RICO, in Fulton County, if they didn't dream it up themselves? It's hard for me to think someone like Fani could mastermind this; the consensus so far is that as incompetent prosecutors go, she's about the best Trump could hope for. Somebody else simply has to be behind the whole scheme, and it's hard ...

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...