Victoria Nuland Announces Retirement; No Plan B

Yesterday's AP headline completely misses the point:

Victoria Nuland, the third-highest ranking U.S. diplomat and frequent target of criticism for her hawkish views on Russia and its actions in Ukraine, will retire and leave her post this month, the State Department said Tuesday.

Nuland, a career foreign service officer who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe during the Obama administration but retired after Donald Trump was elected president, returned to government as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden administration.

She had been a candidate to succeed Wendy Sherman as deputy Secretary of State and had served as acting deputy since Sherman’s retirement seven months ago but lost an internal administration personnel battle when President Joe Biden nominated Kurt Campbell to the no. 2 spot. Campbell took office last month.

Nuland had served at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the tumultuous 1990s and was in the city during the attempted coup against former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

I posted in some detail on her actual career last August. There, I linked to her Wikipedia entry:

From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, exercising an influential role during the Iraq War. From 2005 to 2008, during President George W. Bush's second term, Nuland served as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, where she concentrated on mobilizing European support for the NATO intervention in Afghanistan.

. . . During the Maidan Uprising in Ukraine, Nuland made appearances supporting the Maidan protesters. In December 2013, she said in a speech to the US–Ukraine Foundation that the U.S. had spent about $5 billion on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since 1991. The Russian government seized on this statement, claiming it was evidence the U.S. was orchestrating a color revolution.

. . . Nuland was the lead U.S. point person for Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, establishing loan guarantees to Ukraine, including a $1 billion loan guarantee in 2014, and the provisions of non-lethal assistance to the Ukrainian military and border guard. Along with Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, she is seen as a leading supporter of defensive weapons delivery to Ukraine. In 2016, Nuland urged Ukraine to start prosecuting corrupt officials: "It's time to start locking up people who have ripped off the Ukrainian population for too long and it is time to eradicate the cancer of corruption". While serving as the Department of State's lead diplomat on the Ukraine crisis, Nuland pushed European allies to take a harder line on Russian expansionism.

Her husband, Robert Kagan, is a prominent neoconservative academic, while her brother-in-law, Frederick Kagan, has been a major contributor at the Institute for the Study of War, a major cheerleader for the US interventionist strategy in Ukraine, which suggests the incestuous nature of neoconservative policymaking overall.

She was a prime mover in the US proxy interventions in Ukraine, which led to the 2014 Donbas annexation followed by the 2022 invasion, and her star in the Biden administration rose until, by reports, Secretary Blinken and the CIA began to become disillusioned with the 2023 counteroffensive that July. At that point, Biden appointed her Acting Deputy Secretary of State following the retirement of Wendy Sherman. According to a story at Gateway Pundit citing reports from Seymour Hersh behind a paywall,

At the same time, “ultra-hawkish” Victoria Nuland was promoted by Biden from Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs to Acting Deputy Secretary of State ”over the heated objections of many in the State Department,” Hersh writes. “She has not been formally nominated as the deputy for fear that her nomination would lead to a hellish fight in the Senate. “

“Tony Blinken, who publicly vowed just a few months ago that there would be no immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, is still in office and, if asked, would certainly dispute any notion of discontent with Zelensky or the administration’s murderous and failing war policy in Ukraine,” Hersh writes. The White House’s “wishful approach to the war, when it comes to realistic talk to the American people, will continue apace,” Hersh said. “But the end is nearing, even if the assessments supplied by Biden to the public are out of a comic strip.”

So with the end nearing, it appears that saner heads among Biden's handlers nominated Kurt Campbell to fill the Acting Deputy spot, which then led to Nuland's decision to retire. But according to the AP story at the top link, she'd already retired once, when Trump was elected in 2016, which suggests she anticipated then that Trump wouldn't favor the Ukraine policies of covert Western intervention with which she'd been identified through much of the Obama administration. Now, with a Trump return in the realm of possibility, it looks like she's made an equivalent decision.

Says something about Trump, doesn't it? This also suggests the Biden administration is quietly backing off its whole Ukraine policy, something that it has been telegraphing since last summer, but without adjusting its legislative priorities. The current "bipartisan" border security bill, now stalled in the House, contains $60 billion in additional Ukraine funding in an apparent attempt to maintain appearances while doing nothing to change the actual military balance.

Nuland's retirement, following a tacit acknowledgement that her appointment as Deputy Secretary would never get Senate confirmation, suggests that the administration has dropped its post-2022 Ukraine policy without annuncing a Plan B. This seems like it's par for the course lately, as there's no plan B for Biden, either.

McConnell's Turnaround

I've been noting here that Trump is moving to take over the Republican apparatus in light of his status as presumptive nominee, which he's achieved much earlier than he did in 2016. Not as much has been said, though it should be, about his role in pushing Mitch McConnell to announce his retirement as Senate Republican leader. A month ago, I noted that McConnell had been forced to reverse his support for the Senate border "compromise", citing a source, "McConnell said the political mood in the country has changed since negotiations began months ago."

The change was Mike Johnson's election as Speaker and Trump's surge in the polls.

Two weeks ago, having made it plain to RNC chair Ronna McDaniel that her resignation was expected, he sent the same message to McConnell:

. . . 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.”

This wasn't the language of Trump's first term -- he had no real choice but to work with McConnell at the time. All of a sudden, he's sending McConnell an unambiguous message that his time's about up. Something's happened.

[A]ny serious attempt to understand history’s longest-serving Senate leader needs to focus on the age in which he rose to power: those eight years of Republican rule in the early 2000s. . . . More than anything, Mitch McConnell was a Bush Republican.

. . . Few Americans of either party hold much nostalgia about the George W. Bush presidency, and former Rep. Liz Cheney’s headlong charge into obscurity doesn’t quite inspire imitators. Better to draw your authority from a deeper well.

. . . Mitch McConnell won leadership of the Senate GOP in 2006 — just off three years of controlling the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, which they used to tinker on business-friendly reforms, while failing to achieve a lasting effect.

The defining issues of the day were bailouts for Wall Street, the president’s promised amnesty for illegal immigrants, and the increasingly unpopular Iraq War. McConnell supported all three.

. . . His legacy epitomizes the Republican Party of the 2000s: corporate tax cuts, unfettered spending on defense and liberal programs, and the abandonment of any serious legislative efforts on cultural issues, from abortion to marriage to immigration.

It’s fitting that after four decades in the Senate, he hopes funding the war in Ukraine will cement his legacy. It’s priorities like these — and men like him and other Bush Republicans — who opened the door for the new right’s rebellion within the ranks.

Nevertheless, McConnell appears willing to acknowledge circumstances:

Senate leader Mitch McConnell is the highest-ranking Republican in Congress who has yet to endorse Donald Trump's bid to return to the White House — having once called the defeated president "morally responsible" for the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack.

. . . McConnell's political team and Trump's campaign have been in talks over not only a possible endorsement of the former president but a strategy to unite Republicans up and down the party's ticket ahead of the November election, according to a person familiar with the situation and granted anonymity to discuss it.

. . . In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, key Republicans, including McConnell, signaled unequivocally they were done with Trump.

In a scathing speech during the Senate impeachment trial on charges Trump incited the insurrection at the Capitol, McConnell decried Trump's intemperate language and the "entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe" and "wild myths" about a stolen election.

What's increasingly clear is that Trump now appears to be in a stronger political position, certainly within his own party, than he's ever been, especially during his first term. Exactly why this is needs to be examined, but the failure of consensus Bush-era policies, including neoconservative foreign policy and softness on illegal immigration, is certainly one factor. The controlling metaphor of the "stolen" election is another, which I'll take up again soon.

Chutzpah

As the presumptive Republican nominee in the November election and leading Biden in the polls, Trump has increasingly been taking over the party machinery, but he's also beginning to send serious foreign policy signals over the direction his next administration is likely to take. In the most recent example,

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will meet former President Donald Trump on Friday, March 8 in Florida, Orban's press chief told Hungarian state news agency MTI late Sunday.

Last month nationalist Orban endorsed Trump's bid to return to the presidency this year.

"We hope the current president will go, and President Trump will return and he will have free hands to make peace [in Ukraine]," Orban said Feb. 23.

Elsewhere,

At the invitation of former President Donald Trump, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will be traveling to the USA next week. However, it seems unlikely that he will meet with President Joe Biden, reports eXXpress.

Orbán will meet with Trump in Florida on Friday, March 8, as confirmed by his spokesperson Bertalan Havasi on Sunday. The announcement did not mention any plans for a meeting with President Biden. Additionally, Orbán’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó is scheduled to visit Russia again at the end of March.

Note the oh-by-the-way about the foreign minister's upcoming visit to Moscow. It's likely that this will transmit some sort of message from Trump to Putin, and this will inevitably involve some sort of argument from circumstance over Ukraine -- the West generally has invested well over $100 billion in the proxy war, only to have become bogged down with no hope of even returning to pre-2022 boundaries.

From the AP:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán confirmed Friday that he will visit Donald Trump in Florida next week, and described a possible comeback by the former U.S. president as the “only serious chance” for an end to the war in Ukraine.

Addressing a diplomacy forum in Turkey, Orbán also suggested that Trump’s possible return to the White House could help end the conflict in Gaza.

. . . “The only serious chance for peace is if he’s able to come back and to make peace,” Orbán told the forum. “Otherwise, the war between Ukraine and Russia will be long.”

Trump’s return “is a precondition for a strong and quick peace in the European continent,” he continued.

Orbán said he was convinced that if Trump had been in office when the war in Ukraine started “there would have been no war now.”

Let's go back to the 2017 kerfuffle over Trump's national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Logan Act:

The controversy over former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States has revived interest in an obscure 18th-century federal law known as the Logan Act.

On Monday evening, Flynn resigned after reports that he had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with the Russian official before Trump took office. At the end of December, the Obama administration imposed sanctions following the determination of U.S. intelligence officials that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election to undermine then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning.

The Russian-interference angle, of course, was never anything but the purest moonshine, but it's an indication of the extreme Democrat sensitivity to Trump making foreign policy initiatives when he isn't formally and legally in office. If in 2016 he was telegraphing negotiations with Russia while he was merely president-elect, what are they going to do now that he's just the presumptive nominee and current front-runner, nearly a year before he could be sworn in? Here's more on the 2017 Flynn controversy:

Michael Flynn, President Trump's former national security adviser, pleaded guilty Friday to providing false statements to the FBI. Those are less serious charges than he could have faced, because he is cooperating with special prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigators.

Flynn likely has something to trade, as NPR's Carrie Johnson noted on All Things Considered Friday. Flynn was not acting alone, according to charging documents against him. In fact, there were multiple members of the presidential transition team who spoke with Flynn about his communications with the Russian ambassador.

That included a "very senior member," who "directed Flynn to contact officials from foreign governments, including Russia ..." Several news organizations have identified that individual as Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law.

Ah, the Mueller investigation. This lasted from May 2017 to March 2019 as an ongoing effort to undermine the Trump presidency, abetted by never Trumpers within the administration like William Barr. The results were inconclusive -- namely, they didn't lead to impeachment and removal for Trump -- and Mueller took the blame:

People across the political spectrum, even those who have worked with Mueller, were airing concerns that the 74-year-old longtime lawman, at a minimum, appeared out of practice.

“This is delicate to say, but Mueller, whom I deeply respect, has not publicly testified before Congress in at least six years. And he does not appear as sharp as he was then,” David Axelrod, the former top Obama White House strategist while Mueller was FBI director, wrote on Twitter about 45 minutes into the nationally televised hearing.

“Bob Mueller is struggling,” added Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor who worked under Mueller in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C. “It strikes me as a health issue. We need only look at footage of his earlier congressional appearances to see the dramatic difference in his demeanor and communicative abilities.”

But if Michael Flynn's putative violation of the Logan Act -- he was never indicted or tried for that, he was forced to plead guilty to lying to the FBI -- was enough to force a two-year fishing expedition by the deep state, what are they going to do about Trump's meeting with Orbán? It seems all but announced that this meeting will lead to some sort of back-channel message from Trump to Putin via Orbán's foreign secretary, with Trump a private citizen fully out of office and without even the justification that he's president-elect. What's Joe Biden gonna do about this, if Obama had James Comey perp walk Michael Flynn in early 2017 for far less?

I don't think Biden will do anything. Looking back, the Mueller investigation was an early draft of the lawfare strategy, which has proven feckless, and in fact, the 2024 election is turning out to be a referendum on the Democrat opposition to Trump throughout his first term. The whole Biden administration has simply been a real-world refutation of the Democrat strategies since 2016; whatever they may argue, on whatever flimsy grounds, people are looking back and deciding things were better under Trump.

Any attempt to reboot the Logan Act strategy against Trump or whichever fall guy they may try to designate a la Flynn will simply drive Trump higher in the polls. Trump knows this. Somewhere among Biden and his handlers, they know this too.

Whatever's Become Of Hunter?

In recent weeks, both Joe Biden's son Hunter and his brother James have given closed-door depositions to the Comer Committee, and the transcripts have been released. On Thursday, the New York Post ran the headline, After years of denials, Hunter Biden FINALLY acknowledged Joe was ‘the big guy’ in $5M China deal. The next day, it had the story Joe Biden got $40K from China funds, brother James admits in bombshell impeachment interview.

Nobody noticed. Last fall, this would have been much bigger news. I think there are several reasons. One is that by this point, the whole Biden family boodle has been factored in; the part of the public that follows the news has inferred everything there is to infer, and it's moved on. Second, while there's a there there, it's never turned into anything big. Joe got $40K from China? Heck, Nathan Wade go $600K from Fani, and that was for piddling stuff like wine tasting tours.

Third, the Hunter-Joe-James story had nothing to do with Trump, and that may be the secret. Trump's steady rise in the polls began with the federal and Fulton County indictments and the New York joke civil cases in the middle of last year, and those all had to do with Trump. Trump is an interesting guy, Joe Biden is a nebbish. Former Clinton intimate Dick Morris says at 2:00:

[T]he charges against Trump are so noisy and so all-encompassing that they eat up all the room in the election and suck all the oxygen out of the room. After you finish debating whether Trump led a revolution or not, and after you finish debating whether Trump intimidated a woman who he raped or not, what are you gonna do, talk about his stand on Social Security, talk about his stand on dealing with China? There's no place for the other issues in the dialogue.

In other words, it's all about Trump, plus the comic-book villains who're made to order to serve as his foils: Judge Engoron, Fani Willis, Nathan Wade -- and the problem is that more are lined up like Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Jack Smith. Trump may as well be campaigning against the Joker.

As the famous statement attributed to Clausewitz and others goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Republican strategists came up with a perfectly reasonable idea that dated back to 2020 and the first reports of the Hunter laptop: hit Joe with all the Biden family scandals. The good part of that plan was that it could attach to any generic Republican candidate, and it's actually been a rationale for the Haley campaign: Biden and Trump are equally awful, and Haley is the one remaining alternative.

The problem the get-Hunter strategy has had to confront, though, is that Joe is a nebbish, so is Hunter, so is James, and so is Hunter's BFF Kevin Morris. These guys aren't worth Trump's time; he's got more interesting things to do, and that's what the YouTubers and others, up to and including Alan Dershowitz, are gleefully following. Hunter has been overtaken by events; the generic Republican strategy of going after Hunter was never more than so-so, and as Trump moves steadily closer to the nomination, he isn't going to need it. That's for Nikki to try to salvage.

The Hunter strategy may in fact, though, have had some secondary effect. From the little we hear, Joe has been at least in part preoccupied with Hunter's legal problems, and the baggie-near-the-Sit-Room scandal appears to have forced Joe to move Hunter out of the White House -- for whatever he was worth, Joe seems to have needed Hunter as an important adviser/enabler. If that had even a minimal effect in distracting Joe from better uses for his time, it served its purpose, but the focus now is on Joe himself. The Hunter strategy for generic Republcans was never going to be a winner, and now it's beside the point.

Plan A Continues To Collapse

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 performance was abysmal:

Closing arguments from prosecutor Adam Abbate have been marked by long pauses and halting answers as he at times struggled to answer questions from Judge Scott McAfee.

In one particularly awkward exchange, McAfee asked Abbate why District Attorney Fani Willis would at first fight her subpoena to testify at last month’s evidentiary hearing, only for her to change her mind and answer questions voluntarily. Abbate cited the very public nature of the hearing and how intrusive many questions were.

So in what looks to be the best case for Willis, if she stays on the case, finding capable prosecutorial talent and bringing them up to speed before the election could be a problem, as the defendants will continue to find reasons for further delay. But if Willis herself is disqualified, the whole case is likely out the window.

Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court's decision to hear Trump's immunity claim will significantly delay the January 6 trial under Judge Chutkan, originally seheduled to start on Monday:

“The surprise is that it took the court the better part of two weeks to reach this result, from which no justice has publicly dissented,” [CNN Supremne Court analyst Steve] Vladeck said. “The justices couldn’t reach consensus on a way to resolve the matter without giving it full briefing and argument.”

“It’s hard to read any tea leaves into whether that makes the court more likely to side with former President Trump when it finally resolves his immunity claim, but it certainly means that, even in the worst-case scenario for Trump, the January 6 prosecution will be delayed for at least another 3-5 months. That’s a pretty big win for Trump even if he ends up losing this case,” Vladeck added.

This drives Politico to wishful thinking:

Almost immediately after the court’s order, a consensus seemed to form among the pundit class: that it will now be impossible for Trump’s trial in Washington to take place before the election. Here is the reality — tentative and messy, perhaps, but true nonetheless: Trump’s trial in Washington can still start before November given the time available on the calendar. Trump’s trial also should start before November given the intense public interest.

. . . Let’s assume, however, that the justices issue a ruling in June that rejects Trump’s bid for immunity, which is what should happen on the merits. The situation at that point will get much more fraught, and it will fall to Chutkan to make some difficult choices with no real precedent.

. . . [I]f Chutkan can manage it, she should hold the line. It should not have fallen to her to make this happen, but if Trump’s criminal case comes back to her this summer from the Supreme Court, she should do her best to put the case on the quickest and most reasonable trial schedule that she can devise, even if some on the Supreme Court are working overtime to help Trump to prevent this from happening.

This set of assumptions has the same flaw as the White House's original lawfare strategy: it assumed that with indictments in mid-2023, one or more cases could come to trial and result in a conviction, if not during the primary season, at least by November. This ignored Murphy's Law on one hand, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, but also the simple nature of the legal system, in which defendants will always try to delay trials, and they often succeed in doing this for years.

Another victim of Plan A's failure is Nikki Haley. A good part of her continued campaigh has been based on a perceived contingency that Trump could in fact still at least come to trial in one or another case before the election, and she could become the fallback candidate, but that contingency seems less likely with each passing day:

When Haley exits the race, which could come as soon as next week, after Super Tuesday, the former U.N. ambassador will have outlasted every other one of Trump’s serious rivals. But her incentives to remain in the race are vanishing, and Haley has only pledged to continue campaigning through Tuesday. Even if Trump were to be sidelined for some non-electoral reason — an unforeseen health event or a conviction in his first criminal trial, which is scheduled to start this month — few Republicans think Haley would be the choice of a majority of delegates at a contested convention.

So far, there doesn't even seem to be a good set of possible alternatives for either the Democrats or never-Trumpers on how to proceed given the current developing circumstances.

But Who Was The Mastermind?

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 not to think it was connected to the White House's lawfare strategy. But who?

Breitbart news has had a series of stories over the past week that gives a credible candidate. Citing anonymous sources, they ran this story on Monday:

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.”

In fact, if you go to the Fulton County DA website and drill down, DiSantis is one of only three non-African-American faces of nine pictured on the page showing Willis and her immediate staff. An excerpt from the gallery is below:

Breitbart ran an update yesterday:

Democrat operative and Fulton County’s Deputy District Attorney Jeff DiSantis received four payments totaling $131,335 for providing consulting services to Rep. Gabriel Amo (D-RI), a former Biden White House aide who worked with local elected officials, Federal Election Commission records show.

The money flow is significant because sources with direct knowledge of Fulton County’s office told Breitbart News DiSantis is a Biden plant inside a Fulton County office to target former President Donald Trump.

DiSantis’ payments were previously unreported.

DiSantis was working at county DA’s office while operating a consulting firm named “20/20 Insights, LLC.” Sources told Breitbart News deputy district attorneys would likely have to sign an oath that prohibits them from working outside their county employment agreement. DiSantis’s oath, if he signed one, remains undisclosed.

It is also curious that DiSantis contracted with Amo, who worked in the Biden administration as the deputy director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs before running for Congress in 2023. There he worked as the principal liaison to mayors and “local elected officials,” according to his White House bio. Amo also served as an adviser on President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and later served on his transition team.

“That is the connection to the White House,” one source told Breitbart News. “DiSantis did this. 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.”

DiSantis is a wealthy and successful Democrat operative. He ran Willis’ 2020 campaign and raised $4 million dollars.

So under this theory, DiSantis was calling the shots, and Wade was just the executive officer, choosing the rest of the staff and running the office. Wade and Willis were allowed a fairly minimal skim -- by the current estimate, less than a million -- while DiSantis appears to have been drawing down much more in overall baksheesh for a period of years as the Democrat Gauleiter in Georgia.

Typical of Southern Democrats, the white guy is the one actually running the show. On the other hand, if he was running the show, he clearly hired the wrong people for the job, whatever their DNA. We'll have to see how this all shakes out.

Whole 'Nother Terrence!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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