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.