☕️PRIVILEGES ☙ Saturday, February 17, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS🦠

Today's roundup reviews the second day of trial in the Fani Willis matter and we dig into Tucker's latest — and most explosive — interview yet. He's taking the gloves off.

Good morning, C&C family, it is Saturday, and time for the Weekend Edition. Today’s roundup was difficult. There is so much going on, all of it important, that it’s getting tough to choose what to focus on and how much time to give each item. Today I was forced to pick two stories: Fani Wade’s second trial day, and Tucker Carlson’s latest explosive interview.

I have not overlooked the significant developments in the Trump cases, nor yesterday’s catastrophic losses by the Ukrainians, and other developments. We’ll get there.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 We must begin with Fani, of course. Yesterday’s hearing, still unconcluded, was not as dramatic as Thursday’s. I did not watch the whole thing but checked in from time to time.

It began with a whimper. Having almost certainly spent much of the night preparing for Fani Willis’s cross examination, and for their chance to pick her alibis apart, the Defendants’ lawyers must have felt keenly vexed when Fani failed to turn up to testify. Despite having ended Thursday informing the Court they would start Fani’s cross-examination first thing Friday, by yesterday morning Fani’s lawyers had changed their minds and decided not to call her after all.

It was the right move. They already got all they needed — Fani’s silly “all cash” alibi — into the record on Thursday afternoon. Fani is not a great witness. She talks too much. She’s annoying and not very smart. While her lawyers could have, maybe, rehabilitated her a little, the benefits of putting her on the stand outweighed the risks, including that the Defendants’ attorneys would be better prepared to pick apart the ‘all cash’ story.

The order for a witness is: direct examination, cross-examination, and re-direct. Under the rules, the ‘scope’ of what can be asked about on re-direct is limited just to topics raised during the cross examination. Since Fani’s lawyers did not cross examine her, the ‘scope’ of questions was zero, and so Defendants’ lawyers were not entitled to any re-direct.  It was a good strategy for team Fani.

Fani’s lawyers next called her dad, for one reason only, and that was to say the he “always trained Fani to keep a lot of cash around the house, because that’s a thing that black folks just do.”

Her father, John Clifford Floyd III, is (or was) a Black Panther (and Harvard law graduate), and is a walking, talking stereotype of a 1970’s black marxist activist. It’s a wonder he wasn’t wearing a bowtie instead of his red necktie. He’s clearly a sold-out communist ideologue, and was just there eager to put some stuffing in Fani’s ‘cash payments’ alibi. Overall he was preachy, wordy, uninformative, and uninteresting, but I did laugh when, after waxing eloquent about the merits of using only cash and after extolling at length the sacred custom for black folks to keep their money in bills and coins at home — “most black folks hide cash,” he explained — he later told a story about how much he liked using his American Express and Visa cards and his Traveler’s Checks back when he was running around the country working for the Revolution.

And his reason why black folks keep cash? Racism, of course. The magical invocation that explains everything and nothing at all.

One odd bit of testimony was when John explained that in 2019 he was living in South Africa and he knew Covid was coming. “I knew Covid was coming before. They may have announced it in '20 but in fact, I knew about it, and I knew what was happening in '19,” he explained. Nobody has any idea what he meant; Fani’s lawyer didn’t follow up (it wasn’t relevant to anything) although the claim has made a lot of folks curious.

Maybe he’s Nostradamus or communicates with the departed spirit of Lenin.

Also odd was John’s testimony that he does not have a very close relationship with his daughter, Fani. He’s only seen her 13 times in the last three years. He didn’t even know she was seeing Nathan Wade until six weeks ago (long after the relationship ended). He described another man, a DJ, that he said Fani was dating at the same time she was seeing Nathan Wade.

Finally, there’s a lot of chatter about John’s surprising admission that he was prepared by Fani’s lawyers on the cash issue. That probably violated several rules and a judicial order about preventing witnesses from hearing the testimony of other witnesses, but I don’t think it will amount to much. It looks gross though.

Next up, and occupying the remainder of the day, Nathan Wade's former law partner Terrence Bradley took the stand, not realizing he was walking into a life-sized Cuisinart. He is probably deeply regretting it now. Terrance is widely thought to know about the Wade-Willis affair and about the fact that it started before Willis hired Wade, which has become some kind of highly-disputed key fact.

Clearly Terrence did not want to talk. But apparently he won’t lie, so he and Fani’s lawyers raised all kinds of procedural arguments including that any questions about Wade, and any emails or texts between the two men referring to Fani, were barred by the attorney-client privilege.

Most of the afternoon was spent wrangling over whether the privilege applied. Terrence testified he couldn’t remember when — not even what year — he started representing Wade. He testified that Wade never signed a client contract. He testified he never billed Wade. So, for the privilege to apply, you must believe that Terrence became Wade’s attorney for free and with no contract and they never documented it or referred to it as a representation.

At some point Judge McAfee said look, to decide whether any privilege applied, he would have to hear Terrence’s potential testimony — what he knows about the affair — in camera, meaning privately, in his judicial chambers, just the two of them, as a sort of preview. It’s a common way judges deal with thorny issues of alleged privilege or confidentiality.

That’s what cooked Terrence’s goose and wrecked his day, if not his year, if not ensured he and his family will have to flee Atlanta.

It wasn’t intentional. Judge McAfee had no idea that Willis’ lawyers distrusted the mild-mannered, cooperative Terrence. Sure, they were tender and gentle with him on the stand, to keep him happy and squarely on the Fani reservation. But they still worried, a little, that Terrence might suddenly and unexpectedly go rogue, or that the judge might order him to actually answer the question and overrule their privilege objection.

So Fani’s lawyers had a backup plan. A plan to destroy Terrence as a witness. Just in case.

When the judge announced he would hear Terrence’s testimony in camera, Fani’s lawyers knew it was all over. They knew the judge would hear, albeit off the record, that Nathan Wade and Fani Willis were bumping uglies in 2021 — before Wade got hired. Even if that fact wasn’t later admitted into the record, the judge would know.

So Terrence had to be destroyed.

The monotonous energy of the long, dull, privilege-related afternoon suddenly shifted and electrified everyone watching. It started unexpectedly when Fani’s lawyer peered at Nathan’s poor former law partner and sweetly but explosively asked her next question, something like, “You left the firm under bad circumstances, didn’t you?”

Oh, no.

It was a tactical nuclear weapon, legally speaking. What slowly and painfully next emerged was that Terrence had been terminated as a partner from Nathan Wade’s law firm for — allegedly — sexually assaulting an employee. He denied the assault happened but admitted the accusation, and admitted that he’d paid the employee off somehow, through a convoluted explanation about some money in an escrow account that he “left behind” but which he knew would be delivered to the alleged victim.

Then Willis’ attorney delivered the coup de grâce. She innocently asked “and who was it who actually fired you?” Terrence glumly answered, “Nathan.”

Yikes! The clear point — though missed by many commenters in the excitement of the moment — was that nobody should believe Terrence because he’s just a disgruntled ex-partner with a grudge against Nathan for unfairly firing him for a sexual assault Terrence denies ever happened.

The whole thing is a jumbled mess, and again, caught the Defendants’ lawyers completely by surprise. Absent a deposition, they lacked any details about this story with which to rehabilitate Terrence’s squashed credibility (although they quickly found another avenue of attack). But normally, you impeach a witness like this after they testify about something, not before.

Fani’s lawyers didn’t need to impeach Terrence. They could’ve waited till after the judge ruled on the privilege issue, and even then waited to see what Terrance would say. But they were so worried about what the judge might hear in camera that they nuked Terrence’s reputation over an unproven allegation on a live Internet stream with millions of folks watching in rapt attention.

People have committed suicide over less.

It seems like Fani’s lawyers panicked. Not only did they chum Terrence’s professional reputation into bloody bits and throw it overboard to the sharks, but they committed an unforced technical error in the process, which the Defendants’ lawyers immediately pounced on.

One original predicate for raising the attorney-client privilege was that the reason for Terrence’s leaving the firm was privileged, and was somehow connected to the Fani Willis case. But, by asking that question — a question they wouldn’t let the Defendants’ lawyers ask — they destroyed whatever privilege there might have been, if there was any, which it suddenly looked like never existed to begin with.

That distinction was not lost on the Defendants’ lawyers, who immediately sprang to their feet and started arguing. The distinction was also not lost on the judge, who seemed skeptical about any of the privilege arguments: "Mr. Bradley previously testified that the reason he left the firm was totally and completely covered by privilege. When asked by the state, he went into a factual scenario that, to my mind, I don't see how it relates to privilege at all. And so now I'm left wondering if Mr. Bradley has been properly interpreting privilege this entire time," the judge said.

The bottom line was Judge McAfee still wants to hear Terrence’s proposed testimony in camera before he rules, and the hearing was continued until that happens. Any decision will happen well after that.

What we are left with is where we were Thursday but even more so. I hope people in Atlanta are paying attention. You might be a wealthy liberal but just look at the crooked gang of criminals running your State Attorney’s office. If people accept that this is what government is supposed to look like, then we have some big problems.

🔥 Look no further for your weekend listening. Tucker just published his latest interview, this one with Mike Benz, a former Trump State Department official who’s testified in congressional hearings such as the House Weaponization Committee, and is the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. The interview — badly under-billed as a discussion about ‘free speech’ — is being described as one of Tucker’s most important interviews yet. It’s a knockout.

Tucker: “Wait a minute. It looks like they knew the outcome of the election seven months ahead of time.”

Benz: “It looks very bad.”

EPISODE 75: Tucker Carlson interviews Mike Benz (1:04:45) For right now, to give you a quick high-level overview, I found this three-minute clip including the rhetorical high-point of Benz’s talk: CLIP: Mike Benz describes the re-definition of democracy (2:48).

In an hour, Benz easily and credibly connected so many dots it is hard to adequately describe. You might even call it a “theory of everything.” Tucker barely spoke. Benz talks fast, a rushing verbal stream spouting facts and names and data, slightly jumbled by a smidge of occasional wonkyiness. But Ben’s quick facility with the information also lends credibility, and listening to him explain what’s really going on is like watching in fast motion someone put a difficult ‘starry sky’ puzzle together.

Blam, blam, blam, the pieces keep plopping into place and you quickly start to see a new and unexpected vista — and then suddenly you get it, you know what it is, before the puzzle is even halfway done.

Benz started by summarizing the history of online “free speech.” It will not surprise you that it was always a military operation, beginning with the Internet itself (just ask Al Gore), and was extended by Pentagon-picked winners like Sergey Brin of Google, whose search engine company started with a DARPA grant. From the start of the Internet till shortly before the 2020 election, the military-intelligence complex loved free speech online; it was their best non-kinetic weapon and they liberally deployed it against foreign enemies, over and over.

In the process, they created a government-toppling, color-revolution-fomenting playbook for undermining ‘anti-democratic’ societies through subversive online speech and protest — what the toppled governments probably accurately called ‘disinformation.’

For short, I will collectively refer to the shady, permanent, parasitic underclass of the federal government and its captive horde of quasi-governmental, “public/private” NGOs, plus the swarming Neocons within the CIA, State Department, Pentagon/DoD, FBI, and now DHS, all together as the “Deep State.”

Tellingly, the Deep State playbook for starting a color revolution included using online free speech against our enemies (and against uncooperative allies) specifically by undermining confidence in elections and keeping handy large groups of standby protestors for immediate deployment whenever and wherever needed, which could be (and were) activated and directed through online posts and bulletin boards and so forth.

Stop for a second. Now you know why they freaked out and overreacted about 2021 ‘election deniers’ and January 6th protestors. To the Deep State, the grassroots pushback against the stolen election on social media involving a large Capitol protest looked just like their own color revolution playbook.

Anyway, picking up the timeline, back during the Internet’s salad years, the Deep State found free speech essential to democratic government, and routinely pounded the U.N.’s giant conference table demanding the Internet remain free for all everywhere in the world. They kept a firm grip — what Benz calls “guardrails” — on the U.S. electorate through corporate media “gatekeepers.”

But sometime shortly after Trump’s election, the Deep State’s love affair with free speech soured. It wasn’t just Trump. It was the whole rising rightwing nationalism, a movement deeply skeptical of the Big Government globalist institutions responsible for picking governmental winners and losers. The right wing was deeply skeptical of the Deep State itself.

The Deep State was shocked to see its own tools being used organically, by voters, to choose forms of government that were not approved by the Deep State, and to oppose the Deep State’s appointed darlings, like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, or to help effect Brexit, or to elect Trump. Worse, social media was replacing their captive media outlets and they were losing control of the narrative.

And so what they did was re-define free speech into something inherently anti-democratic. Unapproved speech, or politically-unhelpful speech, is now misinformation or disinformation or malinformation.

In other words, rather than being a critical part of its very essence, free speech became a threat to democracy. Which is kind of like saying that the heart began to threaten the head.

I’ve transcribed the part of Ben’s talk where I snatched up a pen and started writing as fast as I could (lightly-edited for clarity and to add context):

“What I am describing is military rule, a total inversion of the concept of democracy itself. What they said was, ‘We need to re-define democracy from being about the will of the voters, to being about the sanctity of democratic institutions. Which is us,’ (meaning the WEF, the Pentagon, the State Department, Blackrock, the NGO’s, the very same Elite Establishments that right-wing voters distrust.)

(Rather than voters), they declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. ‘Democracy’ is just the consensus-building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves.”

Paradoxically, they view us, the voters, as the chief danger to democracy. I would not believe it possible if I hadn’t just watched them glibly re-define ‘vaccine’ and ‘gain of function’ like they were trying on outfits after stealing some poor woman’s Louis Vuitton off the airport luggage conveyor. Ultimately, Benz goes on to connect this grotesque re-definition of democracy, the “threat” posed to ‘democracy’ by voters and our free speech, to the 2020 election, Russia-gate, the Orwellian CISA censorship agency (which he described as a mutant hybrid of the CIA and the FBI), and by extension virtually everything else important happening in the news right now, not least of all why they must stop Trump at all costs.

To me, the timing of this interview looks like another careful move in the as-yet-undefinable drama unfolding this month. The information Benz disclosed is all publicly available, but Benz coherently ties it all together and names names.

To defeat an enemy, the first thing you need to know is: who is the enemy? And where are they?

Benz just tore off the enemy’s mask. The military-intelligence axis isn’t fighting ‘for democracy.’ They are fighting to preserve a failed, unwanted, liberal world order that has long since died and is well into the stinky decaying phase.

If learning Benz’s explanation feels overwhelming instead of empowering, stop thinking of winning in terms of a single apocalyptic battle. Try thinking about winning a war of inches, a guerrilla war waged in a thousand thousand tiny battles, from the halls of Congress right down to Penciltuckee’s School Board meeting room. Or if it ever comes to that, think about winning as a war of quiet resistance and stubborn noncompliance.

You can be quietly stubborn, can’t you?

Finally, I was so shocked by learning this that I am leaving you with Michael McFaul’s “7 Pillars of Color Revolution,” which has been the Deep State’s playbook for the last 20 years or so. Everyone needs to know that this is how they undermine democracies. Don’t be fooled by McFaul’s Orwellian reference to “semi-autocratic” regimes; he’s talking about us. After all, free speech is required for this formula to work, and free speech is not a feature of autocratic governments (by definition!). It is, after all, nearly undeniable that they successfully deployed this strategy to overthrow Ukraine’s government in 2014:

That’s straight from their own white papers. Does any of it sound familiar? It should. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Have a wonderful weekend! Coffee & Covid will return on Monday morning with lots more news and commentary, hopefully get us all caught up, and kick the week off right.

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