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There was an incredible scene that played out in Georgia this past week with the testimony offered by Fannie Willis, the central figure in the Georgia racketeering case against former President Donald Trump.
Willis had to take the stage in order to justify many things, including a relationship with someone she employed in the context of that court case, and also a number of other questions related to when that relationship began, how much the figure involved had been compensated, and whether their romantic relationship was properly disclosed.
All these questions could factor into whether she is disqualified from proceeding forward with this case, something that, while it wouldn't necessarily end the case against the former president, would certainly delay it so significantly that it wouldn't come to pass before any kind of November election in a way that would be meaningful or achieve its actual goal of stopping the former president from achieving the office that he once held.
This is, of course, a case involving multiple complex relationships and allegations that have been leveled at enormous numbers of figures within the Trump world orbit. Unlike many of the other cases, it doesn't focus solely on the former president. It includes a mass of other people.
And it's actually an attorney who was hired by one of those other people who discovered and was aware of the relationship at the center of what led to the incredible scene played out in the courtroom as the discussion moved forward regarding whether Fonny Willis should be disqualified. I'll read from a summary offered by Charles Lipson over at the spectator.com.
The specialist Fonnie Willis hired to lead the prosecution had no qualifications for such a complex, difficult case. In fact, Willis really hired Nathan Wade because he was her boyfriend. D.A. Willis then paid her friend Wade more than $650,000 so far. Two other specialists were also hired, one a RICO expert. Those two together have received less than $100,000.
Willis benefited financially from hiring Wade since the two took some seven vacations together in the U.S. and abroad. All the expenses were charged to Wade's credit card, and the indication is that he could only pay for these excursions because her office had paid him so generously.
Both Wade and Willis made false declarations to courts, denying they had a romantic sexual relationship, denying she had hired him before that relationship began, and denying she received any benefits from Wade or others. Those incendiary charges were the topic of Thursday's hearing. Judge McAfee said he would deal separately with another serious allegation that Willis had influenced a potential Atlanta jury with her inflammatory speech to a local black church congregation.
Yet another charge, this one a felony, was only hinted at. Did Willis or her office leak grand jury proceedings to journalists? When Willis took the stand Thursday, her response was ferocious. In long filibustering answers, she not only rejected all allegations, she smeared the defense counsel, saying the questions were really trying to undermine democracy.
Wade, who testified before her, was much calmer. When he finished, Willis stormed into the courtroom, surprising everyone, and she never calmed down.
Willis said that Wade was merely her friend when she hired him. Their romantic relationship only began a couple months later. Second, she never benefited financially from their relationship. Although they had taken multiple vacations together, she had always covered her half of the costs. When asked if she had any proof she had made those payments, she declared she always paid Wade in cash. Her word was all the proof she needed, she said.
Naturally, defense attorneys asked Willis where all this cash came from. She kept it at home, she said, but offered no explanation for the source of this hoard. That's a puzzler since she receives her salary as an electronic payment and has no record of withdrawing cash from an ATM or other source. Nathan Wade has no records of receiving or depositing any cash from her.
So that's all awfully convenient, but this doesn't seem to be something that raises the hackles of any of the people who are covering this situation from the left. I turn you to the New York Times coverage of this. The defense lawyers found this difficult to believe and asked both of them a mirage of questions about the practice. Ms. Willis said that she learned to keep a lot of cash on hand from her father, a retired lawyer and former Black Panther attorney.
who taught her that stockpiling cash was a practical way to assert one's independence. And, you know, when it comes to that kind of attitude, it turns into very quickly a matter of both race and sex. And this is something that I believe Fonny Willis very much intended. Back to the spectator.com and our article there by Coburn.
Against the advice of her lawyers, Fonny Willis just gave an incredible display in court. Her rise to the stand in Georgia to defend herself against her surrounding foes played out like a scene from a latter-day Tom Wolfe novel.
The erstwhile recipient of laudatory coverage from the New York Times, Time magazine and the rest of the resistance media was now in the sights of an antagonistic case. The gray lady framed through a classically racist lens, the strong black woman set upon on all sides by the judgment of mostly white and almost certainly racist southerners.
I'll take you back to the New York Times for this comment. The defense lawyers will likely crowd again into one side of the packed courtroom. They are an aggregate a sea of boxy wool suits and white male faces with Ms. Merchant, a white woman, a stark exception. The contrast with Ms. Willis in glowing magenta could not be more glaring. Yes, this was a news article, by the way.
"'I don't really like wine, to be honest with you. I like Grey Goose,' Willis said, responding to questions about payments for a pairing session with her paramour, Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade, to whom she funneled massive amounts of money in return for work for which he seems at best poorly qualified."
"We are talking about sex," Ms. Willis said with defiance in response to a line of questioning before clarifying to a male attorney, "Mr. Wade, he's a man. He probably would say our relationship ended in June or July. I would say we had a tough conversation in August because presumably women measure the end of things by conversations while men measure it by sex." The scene was incredible, contentious, and absurd.
Ms. Willis claims with a straight face that in the course of a multi-year relationship with Mr. Wade, every one of his purchases, tracked to the nth degree to his misfortune by credit card and discovered during a contentious divorce from his wife, of flights, hotels, meals, sundries, gifts, and other things he might not have been able to afford without the largesse of the state of Georgia, were all reimbursed from her own pocket.
She suggested she gets cash by overpaying at Publix and that she never uses checks. Because Georgia requires the disclosure of any gift from anyone having business with the county of over $100 in aggregate, Ms. Willis must maintain that despite the lack of any records, she paid for her exact half portion at least. She also is required by this obvious fiction to be deliberately vague about when the inappropriate relationship began and ended.
The thick accents of the Georgia lawyers served to inflame the press, but none so much as that of defense attorney Ashley Merchant, the original discoverer of the hot gossip that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade were an inappropriate item. Ms. Merchant's law firm reportedly consists of herself, her husband, and a pair of legal. The Wall Street Journal profiled her recently, and you can find it just across from a gas station.
But when she was hired by a Trump case defendant so low down the list that MSNBC rarely uses his picture, she was not one to avoid following a lead. What she found could wreck the entire Georgia case, setting it back months until after the election and resulting in terrible consequences for Ms. Willis, who seemed to admit over and over again from the stand to new and even more troubling violations, including potentially election financial fraud,
The kind of thing that, you know, you would never have seen her admit, obviously, without the context of this incredible, incredible revelation. We'll be back with more of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.
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Reporting live from under my blanket, I'm Susan Curtis with Dunkin' at Home. Breaking news, pumpkin spice iced and hot coffees are back. I'll pass it to Mr. Curtis with his blanket for the full story. That is so right, Susan. You know, it's never too early to get in a spicy mood. I'm talking cinnamony goodness that's so tasty, people don't want to leave their blankets either. Back to you. No, back to you. All you. The home with Dunkin' Pumpkin Spice is where you want to be.
To me, it's particularly interesting that the left has been so quick to turn this into the kind of scene that we've seen them do before, in part because I think it hasn't worked for them recently. It certainly didn't work for them with Christine Blasey Ford. It didn't work for them with Anita Hill before that.
And it certainly is not going to work, I think, here trying to turn Fonny Willis, not a particularly sympathetic character, into some kind of, you know, icon of martyrdom on the cause of going after Trump.
The tough, strong prosecutor now is pivoting back in the only way that she can by trying to be a martyr for the cause, by stressing the sexual and racial aspects of what she's been accused of.
That's the only way you end up being the new Stacey Abrams. That's the only way you end up being someone who can be held up as having only gone down because you intimidated the dominant white racist Southerners and confronted them for their hypocrisy and the like.
As opposed to simply doing the same kind of thing that just about everyone should go down for. Namely, violating the rules, violating the laws, violating everything that they were supposed to do in the course of this office. I thought that no one was above the law. And yet, she slays along the way. Here's the Washington Post coverage from Robin Givhan.
She didn't...
She didn't have to. She simply talked about what her father had told her to do as a matter of independence and power. I don't need any man to foot my bills, Willis said. I'll just interject, well, except he did. Willis sat in the witness chair for hours, or more precisely, she reclined in the chair, woman-splaining how men define relationships and how they end them.
She did so wearing a fuchsia dress with a single strand of beads around her neck. Her hair styled in soft shoulder-length curls, her eye makeup precise and intentional. She was a singular bright spot surrounded by a black-robed judge and lawyers in mostly somber suits. Only Willis and her main inquisitor, merchant who wore a cobalt blue dress under a white blazer, stood out in the room's sobriety.
During a November interview with the Washington Post, Willis was asked what advice she'd give to younger women who are trying to be heard. Willis said, in part, "You should be comfortable enough in your own skin to be authentically you, to be a woman. It's okay to be pretty. It's okay, you know, to think of things that are feminine things and still be a strong leader."
Willis walked into court as a woman on the ropes. Some would say the hearing was a mess of her own making. Others might believe the whole mess is a distraction from more important matters. Either way, Willis fought back with gobsmacking fury, defiant in power pink.
As a slight addendum to this Robin Givhan piece, I would point out that according to a number of different internet sleuths, Ms. Willis was wearing her dress backward. I'm Ben Domenech. You've been listening to another edition of the Ben Domenech podcast brought to you by Fox News Radio. We'll be back soon with more to dive back into the fray.
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