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It is hard to convey the exquisite level of awkwardness inherent in a roomful of lawyers trying to work out the exact date when two consenting adults started having penis-vagina sex. On national television. (Not the sex. The lawyers.) The evidentiary part of the hearing is over, but the sting of second-hand embarrassment burns on, after attorneys Ashleigh Merchant and Craig Gillen tried and failed to get Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and her consultant Special Prosecutor Nathan J. Wade, plus assorted family and friends, to admit to Judge Scott McAfee that the divorcees were makin’ RICO, if you know what I mean — and I think you do! — before she hired him.
The whole reason for this is that Willis is currently prosecuting a cast of thousands a dozen-plus including former president Donald J. Trump for colluding to overthrow the election in Georgia in 2020. To assist, she hired as a consultant Wade, whom she then began — or previously had been — sexing up. (They are now broken up.) It is still not entirely clear to us how the personal relationship makes her handling of the prosecution of Trump et al. so tarnished as to mandate her office’s removal of the case. One working theory is that by making the case bigger and more complex than it needed to be, she could shovel public money at her lover — who earned the low, actually, for a lawyer, rate of $250 an hour — who would then take her on trips. So that’s where we are now.
The lawyers came with no evidence or receipts that the boning ever occurred, nor did they leave with any. Instead they just-asked-questions in a fishing expedition with a very broad net. What is dating, is it when you have lunch? What is a relationship? When does it start, with a sleepover? When does it end, when the spirit and soul dies? When you have the breakup talk? When you file for divorce? Is carrying cash normal? The lawyers for fake electors Mike Roman and David Shafer were not sure, but they hoped to at least spook and bewilder Judge McAfee with the prospect that there was enough canoodling to set this case on an ice floe and kick it to drift off to legal Siberia. And it might work! McAfee will move on to setting dates for final arguments next week, and then at some point in the next few weeks he’ll have to decide between the rage of rabid Trump loons and the anger of the deep blue Fulton County electorate, which he will face in May.
In a legal sort of a way, DA Fani Willis was not a good witness. She flung accusations at the defense attorneys, answered questions over objections from her own counsel, and showed withering contempt for the entire proceeding. But for the TV kind of way, she killed it. She busted into proceedings Thursday, surprising her own lawyer, Anna Cross, who was at that very moment trying to convince McAfee that Willis should not have to appear at all, and told all those lawyers exactly how filthy and gross it was for their fake-elector clients to try to get away with crimes by nosing around and feigning outrage over Black people’s perfectly normal and healthy sex lives. All that was missing was a glass of throwing wine for Merchant’s face.
Willis was the only person in the room actually elected in Fulton County, and it showed. As she gestured at one point to the defense table: “These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020, I’m not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.”
Streamers loved it, but not so much Judge McAfee, who threatened to strike Willis’s testimony because she would not stop calling Merchant a liar. Which is not good!
But the drama! Willis implied that she and Wade did not begin their romantic relationship before the case began, implying it was because he had some affliction that hampered his boner, though she couldn’t say exactly what, because “I am not going to emasculate a Black man.”
She testified that though “world traveler” Wade booked their trips through his travel agents, plural, she paid for their trip to Belize out of her own pocket as a birthday gift and a celebration that Wade made it through his health scare alive. She reimbursed Wade for the cost of Royal Caribbean cruises and Napa Valley wine tastings in cash, up to $2,500 a trip.
She attested that she earned that cash with her own sweat and tears, and kept it at her house at all times, because her daddy told her to keep six months’ worth of expenses, and always take at least $200 on dates, so if a man acts up she can go where she wants to go. Willis upbraided Merchant for questioning why she was going on a trip with Wade when she had a tax lien: “Are you going to tell me how to pay my bills now?!” She told the court she broke up with Wade because he’s kind of a sexist jerk:
“Mr. Wade is used to women that, as he told me one time: ‘The only thing a woman can do for him is make him a sandwich.’ We would have brutal arguments about the fact that I am your equal. I don’t need anything from a man, a man is not a plan, a man is a companion.”
Friday, her daddy, John Floyd III, a former Black Panther and criminal defense lawyer who dated Angela Davis, gave the court another reason that Willis and Wade didn’t get to third base before he was hired — she had actually been seeing a DJ named “Deuce” during that time. Thanks, Daddy, I guess.
Papa Floyd also explained that keeping large sums of cash around the house was “a Black thing,” because stores and restaurants could not be relied on to accept Black people’s credit cards or traveler’s checks. He noted the death threats and harassment Willis and the family received since she took on the case, forcing Willis to move multiple times, and he guarded her “uninhabitable” house, mowing the lawn and quietly scrubbing “N-” and “B-” word graffiti off the place without telling Fani.
Next came Merchant getting her ass handed to her by Wade’s former law partner and divorce lawyer, Terrence Bradley, who came straight from a doctor’s appointment and was PISSED. Merchant pressed him anyway for over an hour trying to get answers about when he thought his former lawyer friends might could have done the bunga-bunga or the snuu-snuu, making McAfee finally groan, “Ms. Merchant, I haven’t really heard a point in a while. Can we get along to something, or we’re gonna have to wrap it up?” For Gillen’s part, he tried unsuccessfully to claim Bradley should testify under the crime-fraud exception because adultery is a crime (total nonstarter), and then got Bradley to admit that he, Wade, and Willis once had dinner with Shaq.
It was a sideshow, and not Fulton County’s finest hour.
But, let’s keep it real. Regardless of how long McAfee takes, or what he decides, the Georgia RICO case was never going to start in August. Fani Willis charged 19 people last summer and now 14 loyal believers and one former president remain, already causing a case of Three Stooges Syndrome, with defendants squeezed into a doorframe, saying woop woop woop, chowdahead! All 15 of them can make whatever goofy motions and noises, and you can be sure they will.
Fifteen defendants are perhaps rookie numbers for Willis, compared to the 61 environmental protestors, 27 members of Young Thug’s rap label, or 23 members of the Sex Murder Money gang that Fulton County has RICOed lately, but unlike the teenaged hippies or Nasty Nu, the GA 15 have plenty of other people’s money to burn, and nothing better to do. This is fortunate, because Georgia is famous for jury selection taking months, and this case was never going to see a jury before November, regardless of what Judge McAfee decides.
The right wing has, of course, been creaming its Dockers at the possibility of the case being dismissed.
On Fox’s “The Faulkner Focus,” Phil Holloway griped about Judge McAfee not “reining in” Willis’s “emotions,” and heaved, “this is an ETHICAL DUMPSTER FIRE, if she made misrepresentations to the court, Fani Willis could be in VERY BIG TROUBLE, DISBARMENT TERRITORY!” He Tweet-X-ed more of the same fantastical bullshit, which Trump re-Truthed 13 times before getting distracted by a certain verdict in New York.
But none of that is going to happen, disbarment or flames, and there’s not going to be a dismissal. There is a non-zero chance of disqualification, though, which is bad enough. Whatever the facts and timeline of the sex-having may have been, the appearance is not great, and Willis should have known better. On the other hand, Judge McAfee is running for election in May to keep his appointed seat in deep-blue Fulton County, and effectively tossing out the case just based on canoodling and sexytimes will absolutely enrage a big part of the bloc. And on yet another hand, he may not care, and want to wash his hands of the whole mess. He is young and earnest, but also was appointed by GOP Governor Brian Kemp.
So, what happens next is anyone’s guess, stay tuned!
