☕️ FOOLISH FANNY ☙ Friday, February 16, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

It's a special Fani Willis roundup this morning. Apart from all the hot takes, what did yesterday's testimony really accomplish? Something miraculous.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday!  This morning, one story’s ample body eclipsed all the other news and we have a single-topic special edition roundup: the dramatic first day of Fani Willis’s testimony in Atlanta. By now you have probably already seen lots of clips and read dozens of hot takes. As a litigator with experience in these types of cases, I couldn’t resist, so I’m going to dig a little deeper into this remarkable and important story and try to give you some commentary and context you haven’t heard yet.

Corporate media wants you to view this two-day hearing as a desperate distraction, a wild, last-ditch effort by the Trump Defendants to deflect from their own misdeeds by prying into the prosecution’s personal lives. Don’t be misled. You are watching history unfold. The players, DA Fani Willis and Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade, are meant to occupy chapters in history books as the courageous crimefighters who rescued democracy. With all our fates intimately intertwined with those of Willis and Wade, it is imperative that we know just who are they?

Nothing like this has ever happened in the Country’s 248-year history. The paramount question of ultimate importance is whether it will ever happen again.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Corporate media did its level best to put a happy face on yesterday’s widely-viewed courtroom events, but the UK Guardian’s headline asked the only question that matters: “After salacious hearing, can Fani Willis regain control of Trump case?” Following a full day of televised testimony, around 3pm in the afternoon, even while her lawyers were still arguing with the judge over whether she should be required to testify, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis strode angrily into the courtroom demanding to take the stand, in an ill-fitting pink dress, with her lapel flag ironically pinned sideways. Then for two hours Fani broke every rule for witnesses.

Out of morbid professional interest, I watched way too much of Fani’s testimony, for too long, and too much of her lover Nathan Wade’s testimony before that. Generally speaking, both witnesses answers were extremely well prepared, much better than I would expect from the caliber of intellects on display. In other words, the two dummies obviously had help.

There were no legal bombshells, no tearful admissions, no “did you order the code red!!” moments or dramatic Perry Mason confessions.  Willis’ and Wade’s story, as absurd and unbelievable as it was (and is), mostly held together under intense examination by surprised defense lawyers doing their best to nitpick a previously unheard and unlikely explanation that mysteriously sprang out of a box for the first time yesterday.

The pair of law enforcement professionals adopted the fraudster’s classic excuse: all the critical transactions that cleared everything up and resolved all the problems happened without records or receipts because it was all done in cash. They never wrote any of the payments down anywhere because they just trusted each other. They never mentioned all the cash payments in any text messages or emails or anything because just because. Mostly it was Fani paying Wade back, for squiring her through a series of sensuous, all-frills romantic vacations in exotic, high-roller destinations like Belize, Aruba, and Napa, California, where she toured wineries and noshed at five-star restaurants.

Considering all her adulterous time off, the legitimate question of how Fani got any work done at the office was unanswered and unanswerable.

The details of their alibis would only infuriate you, such as Fani’s claims she’s never used checks, that she keeps large amounts of cash around wherever “she lays her head,” but can’t account for exactly where the cash came from (“When I took out a large amount of money on my first campaign, I kept some of the cash of that”), and that she never asked for receipts or any statement in order to know how much to pay Mr. Wade, just his word, because he is such an honest fellow.

Wade was equally awful. He was heavily coached, and spouted readymade, well-rehearsed, barely-believable explanations explaining away all his conflicting prior testimony. For instance, he claimed to have paid for the travel using his work credit card — which is why he previously denied under oath having any receipts, since he thought that question only applied to his personal accounts. He said Fani always paid him back in cash (triggering tax lawyers because that is classic tax evasion, but you can be sure some accountant somewhere is busy amending his returns right now). Wade claimed that, when he denied having a relationship with Willis in his divorce affidavit, it was based on his subjective, Clintonesque perception that his marriage had ‘really’ ended in 2015 when things got bad, so he — a lawyer — thought the questions about ‘other relationships’ only applied to pre-2015 ones.

I’m barely scratching the surface, as both liars testified for several hours. Fani’s testimony was not finished, and she’ll resume again this morning. The lawyers for all sides probably worked all night long. Fani’s lawyers worked to try to repair the damage caused by the DA’s bad conduct on the stand, and the Trump Defendants’ lawyers worked to try to find holes in the brand-new stories that were unveiled for the first time at trial, which exposed a major weakness in their strategy that Willis and Wade took full advantage of.

The weakness was the Defendants’ lawyers never had a chance to take Willis’ and Wade’s depositions. Which meant the two corrupt officials could say pretty much whatever they wanted on the stand, depriving the Defendants’ lawyers any chance ahead of trial to find evidence disproving the bizarre claims. Put another way, it is often said about trials that “Rule Number One is: never ask a witness a question if you don’t already know the answer.”

The Defendants’ lawyers were forced to break that rule with nearly every question they asked, because they never had a chance to first ask their questions at deposition, which is how things normally work. Had those depositions happened, yesterday would have gone very differently and Willis and Wade would not have had free rein to propose a literally unbelievable excuse.

Today, the Defendants’ attorneys may have a chance to repair some of that failure, assuming they pull all-nighters last night. But they still might already have won the war.

🔥 Against all the odds, despite all the frustrations and failures, notwithstanding all the cunning and deceitful preparation and planning and scheming and lying, the Trial of Fani Willis is unexpectedly turning the tide and creating a massive victory for President Trump.

The trial is creating a massive victory for President Trump by putting an indelible face on his adversaries. Fani Willis and Nathan Wade are creating a kind of marketing brand, a brand representing the forces opposing Trump. It’s a brand that will surely lose with most Americans. It’s remarkably like the way Bud Lite accidentally destroyed its brand by permanently associating its tasteless beverage with an unattractive cross-dresser.

The public has been intensely interested and outright fascinated with this proceeding. But why? Part of the reason is because America wants to find out who is pursuing President Trump. Are the prosecutors good guys or bad guys? Are they like us or not like us? Are they biased or neutral? Are they acting in good faith, or is this whole thing purely political?

America wanted to meet Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, who now represent proxies or avatars for the entire ‘Get Trump’ effort. Well, we’ve met them. And — against all odds — the Defendants’ lawyers succeeded yesterday in showing America that the Get Trump’s brand representative is a black Dylan Mulvaney. Or possibly worse.

The problems for the prosecutors began almost immediately after Fani Willis took the stand. She made a horribly mistaken theatrical decision to play herself as an overinflated caricature of an entitled black woman — a black Karen — acting antagonistic, aggressive, abusive, and argumentative. She even argued with the judge.

For some reason, Fani spoke in an inner-city black patois rather than in normal English. For example, when asked how she knew how much cash to pay Nathan Wade, she answered, “He tells me how much it is and I gives him the money back… I don’t do my friends like that. So if you tell me it’s a G, then you gon’ get a thousand dolla’s.”

She did not sound like a hardworking, crime-fighting District Attorney of one of America’s biggest cities. She sounded like a moron.

An entitled moron. It’s difficult to imagine America relating to Fani’s profligate spending, jet-setting, cruising, shopping, and multiple luxury vacations every year. Who does she think she is?  And what are we to make of her all-cash life, living off the banking grid? It won’t be long now till folks start asking some uncomfortable questions. Like, wouldn’t a corrupt public official also have a lot of cash lying around their house? Cash they can’t exactly remember where it came from? Like, maybe it was left over from the last campaign, who knows?

All that cash is not … bribe money, is it? Because that’s the classic pattern.

To be clear, nobody, including me, has yet accused Fani of taking bribes from criminals to let them off the hook. And I like cash; I have no problem with people paying for stuff with cash. It beats digital currency. But you can still use banks and checks and debit cards. Using all cash to pay for everything, and always having a lot of cash lying around not in the bank, cash that unaccountably didn’t come from your job, looks, well, kind of shady.

Lots of unaccountable cash and conspicuous consumption often turns out to be related to things like tax avoidance, drug dealing, and bribery. (Which is why they’ll never get rid of cash, but that’s for a different post.) Just ask former Democratic Representative William Jefferson.

I don’t want to get all high and mighty here, but as a District Attorney, Fani Willis should be carefully living above reproach. Not living like a third-rate thug or low-rent gangster.

At one point in her testimony, Fani — Atlanta’s top law-enforcement official — admitted that she let a personal tax lien sit unpaid for several years while she was busily taking First Class vacations and funneling large amounts of cash to her secret lover. When asked by one of the attorneys if she paid cash for cruises but not for her tax lien, Fani admitted yes, defiantly adding “and I went shopping too, and I didn’t pay it off.”

Paying off your tax liens is for coach class citizens.

Finally, and most lamentably, Fani showed over and over that she was not the sharpest intellect in the district’s drawer. When asked by a Defendant’s lawyer how many continents she’d traveled to, Fani struggled to comprehend what a continent is. I am not making that up. She said:

“Where's Belize? What continent? I'm not being funny. I don't know. I been to Belize with him. I been to the Bahamas with him. I been to Aruba with him. Don't embarrass me. I'm not sure what continents those are on.”

How on Earth did Fani graduate from law school? Never mind continent, I’m not sure what planet Fani thinks she is on. On top of suggesting a deplorable lack of education — I blame the public school system — her rambling answer was also a terrific example of Fani stupidly breaking basic rules of being a witness, rules like not talking too much when you answer. The ‘continents’ question wasn’t material or relevant to anything, and her answer didn’t matter. She could’ve just said, “I don’t know,” or “I couldn’t say.”

Abraham Lincoln is said to have observed, “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” Fani was distracted installing CashApp on her phone that day in class, apparently.  Now all doubt has been removed; Fani is a fool.

🔥 At the close of Day One, we are left with a rare, intimate view into America’s blue ruling class, the pinnacle of the Nation’s new two-tiered legal system: Petulant, entitled, uneducated, virtueless, shady, overpaid, and fantastically incompetent. This is the Democrat party’s best and brightest, the warriors selected to prosecute the history-shattering case and legally assassinate a former President and current Presidential candidate.

It’s not clear yet what will happen in Fani’s court. But it is painfully obvious what is happening in the court of public opinion. We shall see what happens when Fani’s fanny takes her seat again this morning. I’ll be watching. Things may change, but the damage is probably already done.

Have a fabulous Friday! And take your seat tomorrow for another fantastic roundup of Coffee & Covid, when I’ll put a bow on the sordid story of Willis and Wade.

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