Today, the defense rested in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York, what was supposed to be the least important of his year of criminal trials for the many felonies he has committed. As Rachel Maddow reminded viewers on her show last night, the one that was supposed to go first was Trump’s trial in Georgia on RICO charges for his coordinated conspiracy to overturn the election in that state, to help overturn the national election he had just lost in grand fashion, due to his status as the least popular, most mocked, most hated man on the planet.
Instead, Republicans in Washington and Republicans in Georgia have gone to (probably criminal) lengths to obstruct justice in that case, and to destroy Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, who has been brave enough to put her life on the line to bring Trump and his criminal associates to justice.
And Maddow had some WORDS about all this, before she interviewed Willis herself.
After tying it to the history of right-wing obstruction of justice concerning American politicians who cavorted with Nazis in the 1940s, Maddow went through the tick-tock of the obscene Republican obstruction efforts to fuck the criminal justice system, ever since the recording emerged of Donald Trump trying to get election officials to “find him” the 11,780 votes he’d need to win Georgia.
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Georgia Republicans suddenly invented themselves a new power to remove prosecutors, now that a Black lady they believe themselves superior to was having the audacity to investigate their God king for trying to overthrow the country.
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They created a new special committee for the investigating of Fani Willis, to investigate Fani Willis (for investigating Trump).
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They want to audit her office!
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Marjorie Taylor Greene is filing ethics complaints!
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House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, the epitome of a washed up JV coach who thinks he’d be in the big leagues if somebody else hadn’t stolen it from him, refuses to stop harassing this woman who, for the record, did not speak to him first. He’s investigatin’ her! He’s gonna hold her in contempt of Congress!
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Now Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley are taking a break from being the Kremlin’s cock-fluffers to investigate Willis. (To be fair, this could be part of that remit.)
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And then of course, we remember that one “hook” Republicans found — Fani Willis dated one of her lawyers! It’s not illegal or an ethical issue, we just think she’s a slut!
They didn’t take her down with that last one — and she’s dead serious that they won’t take her down with any of the others either — but they sure did succeed in delaying, delaying, delaying, to the point that the Georgia trial now won’t happen until after the election.
Maddow was pissed last night, that America is letting this vile shit stand, that nobody is defending Willis from these nakedly political attacks. Even if Republicans do find something to hang on them — and that’s really authoritarian playbook 101, to try to find something legitimate, no matter how minor, to serve as a pretext for destroying their enemies — it doesn’t matter. We all know why Republicans are doing this, and it’s not because they care if Fani Willis’s sex life could have possibly affected her work judgment. (And there’s no evidence it did.)
“Back off,” Maddow said the rest of us would be saying in an alternate universe where we weren’t being cowards about this. “Back off the judges, back off the witnesses and the jurors, back off the prosecutors, back off Fani Willis, protect these cases, protect the rule of law.”
After that, Maddow interviewed Willis. If anybody understands exactly who these Republicans are and what they’re after, it’s she. She called Jim Jordan a “clown.” And she had this to say about the prosecutorial oversight board Georgia Republicans created to control Black prosecutors:
“What is so ironic is, although it’s only 14 of the 50 DAs in the state of Georgia, most of the citizens report to our jurisdictions, so, although we’re smaller in number than the other 36, most of the population has elected these minority DAs to serve them and has trusted their judgment,” Willis argued.
“But apparently we now need Daddy to tell us how to do our job.”
We’d say Willis doesn’t need our help, but that would be the easy way out and prove Maddow’s entire point. Willis does need our help. She needs our support, in big ways and small, and she said that last night. She has a primary election today, and a re-election in November, and somehow through all this, she needs to bring Donald Trump to justice along with all his crime friends.
We have to have her back.
PREVIOUSLY!
Evan Hurst on Twitter right here.
@evanjosephhurst on Threads!
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