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.