My dad and I have a ritual of 5 o’clock cocktails and TV/cable news when I’m visiting, so I watched way more MSNBC over the holidays than the none that I normally would watch. 5 PM Central means Ari Melber on MSNBC, whom I usually don’t mind too much, but he seemed to be on a mission to spout breathless encomiums to the prosecutors going after Trump. I’m not talking one episode — it was multiple lead-off pieces about Jack Smith, Fani Willis and Tish James, to name the ones I can remember.
Maybe I’ve spent too much time listening to my lawyer siblings, and to Ken White (Popehat), but I sure don’t have a huge amount of confidence in your average — or even above-average — prosecutor. The deck is very stacked in their favor in most cases, with clients lacking resources to mount a decent defense, with elected judges who are invested in appearing to be “law and order judges” and with clients who are likely to plea out when they see the charges stacked up against them. So, I think they get lazy and/or sloppy.
This seems to be what happened to Fani Willis. I don’t know what she was thinking when she hired her boyfriend Nathan Wade as the outside counsel (paid $650K) in the Trump and friends RICO case, but it’s definitely sloppy work to think that someone wouldn’t make hay from accusations of self-dealing based on that decision. And here we are today, with news that she traveled with Wade (gift link) to Miami and San Francisco using tickets he bought. Tomorrow or the next day will bring another drip in this drip drip scandal, because Wade is going through an apparently acrimonious divorce, and his wife seems to be more than a little interested in fucking him over. That does tend to happen with divorces, especially when one member of the couple is a lawyer. At minimum, a major fail by Willis that taints the case. At most, it destroys the case when she has to recuse and another prosecutor without the same level of interest/drive is appointed to the case.
I’m all about getting Trump in front of as many judges and juries as possible, but this Willis scandal is a great reminder that prosecutors are quite fallible, often look at prosecutions as a way to advance their political careers, and sometimes have the hubris that comes from easy wins. Also, with regard to the Department of Justice January 6 investigation, prosecutors are sometimes too timid — I’ll outsource the commentary on Merrick Garland’s timidity to Josh Marshall (gift link). In other words, we can’t count on them to do the heavy lifting in getting rid of Trump.
Careful With the Deus Ab Accusatore StuffPost + Comments (144)
