☕️ CONFLICTS OF INTEREST ☙ Tuesday, January 9, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

More 2024 disclosures! Fani Willis caught with, uh, hand in the taxpayer cookie jar; new Lloyd Austin details; Portlander finds Alaska Air door plug; 9th Cir. re-stays Ca. gun law; and a good example.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! And the news keeps on rolling in with another remarkable roundup: Georgia Trump case blowing up with explosive allegations about prosecuting District Attorney Fani Willis’s love muffin; new details emerge in the awful AWOL story of Secretary Lloyd Austin; missing door plug found where you least expected it; Ninth Circuit re-stays awful California gun ban law and it gives Gavin Newsom a tender tummy; and the animal kingdom provides us with more examples of how to fight the deep state globalists.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 My goodness! 2024 continues to deliver, and in heaping barrelfuls. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a breaking story yesterday headlined, “Filing alleges ‘improper’ relationship between Georgia DA, top Trump prosecutor.” Improper is one way of putting it.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is infamously prosecuting President Trump along with a raft of his former election lawyers and campaign advisors under Georgia state criminal charges. Yesterday, one of the President’s co-defendants filed a motion filed in case alleging that DA Willis not only hired herself a love snack, paying him a six figure salary, but also used the unfortunate young man in a sordid scheme to launder taxpayer money and luxurious gifts back to herself.

To which she is no doubt entitled.

Former Trump campaign official and co-defendent Michael Roman filed the motion, which asked the Court to disqualify the frisky DA Willis along with the entire Fulton County District Attorney office. The motion’s allegations — which were at least partly independently confirmed by the Journal-Constitution — included that DA Willis hired outside attorney and love interest Nathan Wade to help prosecute the case.

Mr. Wade is her, well, not exactly a boyfriend, but maybe more like a perk of office, or one of DA Willis’ side hustles. According to public records, after authorization by one Fani Willis, Fulton County taxpayers paid Mr. Wade over $650,000 in the last twelve months alone for his, er, services. The invoices call it “legal fees.”

But Mr. Wade has never worked on a felony RICO case before, never mind a high-profile record-shattering felony RICO case like this one. Fulton County’s approved rate for non-felony criminal prosecutors is only $140 per hour. Wade’s astronomical salary — miles over the approved rates — was not approved by Fulton County commissioners, which the Motion reasonably claims is unlawful. Even more ugly, Wade started working under DA Willis through his enhanced contract on November 1st, 2021 — the day before he filed for divorce in Cobb County.

DA Willis is, coincidentally, also divorced.

The motion alleges the contract payments to Wade appear to have benefitted DA Willis in several, ahem, ways, and therefore amounted to kickbacks, racketeering, and a massive conflict of interest.

By all appearances Mr. Wade has earned every penny. Talk about a dirty job. Mr. Wade is married, but as noted sadly and totally coincidentally finds himself amidst a pretty ugly divorce. I wouldn’t mention his divorce, you know me, privacy first, but it’s relevant to the story because defendant Roman’s very creative criminal lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, relied on then-available documents from Mr. Wade’s divorce case.

Those documents probably included some unfortunate things his soon-to-be ex-wife said during moments of candid but well-justified anger, since she was completely left out of the Willis-Wade arrangement.

Well-respected Atlanta Criminal Defense Attorney Ashleigh Merchant

Right after attorney Ashleigh accessed Mr. Wade’s public divorce file down at the Cobb County clerk’s office, the judge in the divorce case coincidentally entered a sua sponte (“on its own initiative”) order sealing the entire file. Without a motion or a hearing, which is, uh, highly irregular.

One imagines the scene: the Cobb County clerk, nervous, hands slightly trembling, sweating bullets — but still handing over documents while smiling awkwardly and professionally — until one second after Ms. Merchant departs. The clerk scrambles over the counter, sending staplers and pencil cups flying, carefully opens the door and peers around the corner to make sure Ms. Merchant has safely boarded the elevator, then ploddingly jogs, clumsily but earnestly (also heroically, on footwear never designed for running), at top land speed, down the long courthouse hallway, heel strikes echoing up and down the marble corridor — tap tap! tap tap! tap tap! — and finally swerves into the judge’s office without breaking stride.

A frantic, loud, and often angry conservation can be heard taking place inside, with the muffled words not quite legible, but often resembling enthusiastic expletives. Then the judge’s chambers office door bursts open again and the clerk re-emerges, triumphantly, like a dime-store Venus emerging from the legal sea, a freshly-signed order to seal the Wade divorce in her humid hands. She then ponderously lopes back down the long hallway — tap tap! tap tap! tap tap! — sweat stains running down her back, heart racing, to process the order into Fulton County’s court records system and make it official as fast as she can before any more damage is done.

But alas, too late.

I’m only guessing. But, presumably based on information in the sealed divorce records, the Motion alleged that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade are involved in a sweet-sounding “romantic relationship.” The two romantic adulterers traveled together to Napa Valley’s wine country and to the free state of Florida, and happily cruised the Caribbean on Norwegian and Royal Caribbean cruise lines using tickets purchased by Wade. Using taxpayer dollars.

As the Motion described it:

(DA Willis and attorney Wade) have been engaged in an improper, clandestine personal relationship during the pendency of this case, which has resulted in the special prosecutor, and, in turn, the district attorney, profiting significantly from this prosecution at the expense of the taxpayers.

Ms. Merchant told the Journal-Constitution she can prove all her carefully-considered allegations; she’s sitting on some pretty explosive material that she can’t share with reporters at present since the Wade divorce action was mysteriously sealed after she asked the clerk for the copies. But she has recently asked the court to unseal Wade’s case.

Online, Trump derangement types admit this is pretty damaging stuff, but of course argue the Ms. Willis’ private life is her own business and nobody else’s. Who cares what she does with taxpayer money in her off time? At worst, it was bad judgment. But they are worried it will derail Trump’s prosecution.

And they should be. I see another “Claudine Gay” type situation developing. It’s hard to see how DA Willis survives this scandal. This will be a fascinating story.

🔥 The Lloyd Austin AWOL story isn’t going away. Yesterday one tiny new fact emerged, prompting renewed widespread coverage. The Wall Street Journal’s headline said, “Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s Hospitalization Deepens Mystery of His Absence.” The sub-headline explained, “His No. 2 at the Pentagon didn’t learn of his hospital stay until days after he was admitted.”

The Pentagon is still hiding more about this story than it has disclosed. We already knew that, following an ‘elective procedure,’ Defense Secretary Austin went into Walter Reed’s ICU on Monday and was out of commission until Thursday, apparently telling no one but his doctors. His second-in-command Kathleen Hicks took over, but apparently didn’t know why she was taking over, which is why it never occurred to her to tell anyone about Austin’s condition. At the time, she was on vacation in Puerto Rico.

For four days, Ms. Hicks ran the entire U.S. military from her hotel room, in between spa appointments.

If you believe any of that.

Yesterday’s new information was that the Pentagon has deigned to give we the peasants a tiny new morsel of information, the fact Austin was in “severe pain” on New Year’s Eve before he went into the ICU.  That’s it. We still have no idea what’s wrong with him, whether he’s still in the hospital, what’s his prognosis, how his severe pain is going, or anything useful. It seems the Pentagon is now operating as its own independent government. Civilian oversight? What’s that?

It might even be a whole separate country at this point.

You know who else is AWOL? Joe Biden. He has not publicly commented on Austin’s hospitalization, even to reassure the country that everything is under control. Biden’s comments on the story are from spokesmen claiming to be reporting Biden’s words. But Biden hasn’t said anything. Do we know for sure that Biden knows?

Yesterday, Biden was in South Carolina for campaign reasons but refused to answer any questions from reporters.

CLIP: Biden refused to answer reporter’s questions about Secretary Austin (0:21).

Even more bizarre, the statements issued on Biden’s behalf claim Biden is perfectly satisfied with Secretary Austin’s services and has no plans to take any action despite the number two man in the nuclear chain disappearing for a week after an ‘elective procedure.’

It’s almost like the Pentagon is running the country instead of the other way around.

✈️ It’s always in the last place you look. The Washington Post ran a story yesterday headlined, “Door plug that blew out of Boeing plane is found in Portland backyard.” On Friday, the mid-cabin door plug — not an actual door but a sort of permanent placeholder — blew out of Alaska Airlines flight 1282 at 16,000 feet, causing quite a ruckus.

Rapid decompression sucked one passenger’s shirt right off his body.

Alert Portland high-school teacher Bob Sauer discovered the plug resting up in the canopy of his tree-filled backyard. “I wasn’t expecting to find it,” the plain-speaking Portlander explained, perhaps unnecessarily. A neighbor had suggested that he look around his property for the door after hearing it was missing. For whatever reason, Bob didn’t get around to checking for it until after dark on Sunday night.

And, what do you know, there it was, right up in some branches.

CLIP: Reuters interview with door finding teacher Bob Sauer (1:22).

Here it is again, this time on the ground:

Apparently the door didn’t make much noise when it landed. One wonders how differently this story might have been if the door plug had landed on Bob’s house instead of being gently caught by his trees. Presumably he would have found it faster.

🔥 On Sunday, the New York Times ran an encouraging story headlined, “California’s Ban on Guns in Most Public Places Is Blocked Again.” The sub-headline explained: “Just a week after the law was allowed to take effect, a federal appeals court reinstated a lower court’s block on the ban.” California Governor and stealth Presidential Candidate Gavin Newsom was literally sickened by the news:

Among other line-pushing restrictions, Senate Bill 2 includes a long list of “public places” where personal firearms will become illegal. One innovative feature of the bill is that guns would only be allowed in private businesses with clear signage inviting firearms — even with a state permit. (Government employees like cops and IRS agents could still carry guns freely. Just not citizens.) Concealed carry permit holders and allied groups sued the state in federal court to block the law. The trial court issued an injunction blocking the law from taking effect.

The current story began last weekend on December 30th, when a Ninth Circuit panel stayed the injunction, which is a complicated way of saying they allowed the law to move forward. But then on Saturday, a different Ninth Circuit panel dissolved the earlier ruling, which reinstated the injunction and froze the law again, which is what gave Gavin the sads and upset his tum-tum.

The case will continue, with the state’s innovative gun ban law stayed in the meantime. Sorry, Governor.

🔥 A video posted to Twitter this week provided another fine example for us from the Animal Kingdom. Be the mongoose.

CLIP: Mongoose versus lions (1:11).

Mongooses — mongeese? — enjoy a remarkable resistance to snake venom. (Just like how independent thinkers enjoy a remarkable resistance to government psyops like jab campaigns.) According to the internet, mongoose are formidable opponents by virtue of their agility, being able to literally dance around their enemies, as the video ably demonstrates. Mongoose are extremely flexible, able to live comfortably in a variety of environments, work together well (in groups called “mobs”), and are some of the best communicators in the Animal Kingdom.

Imagine that the little mongoose is us, and the WEF globalists are the lions. Let us take our example from the humble mongoose. Figuratively speaking, of course. Don’t bite anybody.

Have a terrific Tuesday! And come back tomorrow morning for another refreshing Coffee & Covid roundup.

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