We’ve seen her like before.
We’ve seen her like before.
W e should know Fani Willis by now.
In her desperately flawed case against Donald Trump, in her sense of umbrage when caught engaging in flagrantly unprofessional conduct, in her dishonesty, and in her willingness to smear her critics, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., is a perfect representative of the resistance.
We have seen similar figures come and go across the past eight years of warfare over Donald Trump. They are, typically, current or former law-enforcement or intelligence officials who are willing to bend the rules and throw out the norms to try to nail Trump for bending the rules and throwing out norms.
Often, they end up disgracing themselves in the process, although not usually as spectacularly as Fani Willis has.
Her case against Trump is a classic resistance operation, with the same DNA as almost all the investigations and indictments running through the Russia hoax to the J6 case. The common thread is the stretching of investigative and prosecutorial powers to — or beyond — the breaking point on the assumption that, whatever the facts, rules, or law, Trump is guilty or, at the very least, deserves whatever he gets.
Her prosecutorial cousins are her fellow partisans, Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, whose idea of justice is selectively targeting Trump and layering on as many charges or as much punishment as possible.
Willis used Georgia’s RICO statute to ludicrously portray Trump and his supporters as a criminal enterprise pursuing the alleged underlying crime of keeping Trump in office, although, as Andy McCarthy has pointed out, that’s not a crime. Trump’s postelection pressure campaign in Georgia was shameful, and all honor is due to Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger for strenuously opposing it. That doesn’t mean it violated the law.
Trump and the people who aided him were going to be given no quarter. At the same time, though, Willis was making every allowance for herself and her wildly unprofessional affair with her special prosecutor, Nathan Wade. The rules for thee (in fact, adventurous and hostile interpretations of the rules), but not for me.
At the hearing on her potential disqualification, Willis was angry . . . that she got caught. She exposed herself as a thoroughly unimpressive hack who shouldn’t be anywhere near public power. And, when pressed on the consequential question of when her relationship with Wade began, she simply lied.
Her first instinct when the affair became public was to play the race card and impugn the motives of her critics.
Being arrayed against Trump means never having to say you’re sorry, whether it’s James Comey, Adam Schiff, James Clapper, or the 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter claiming that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop were the result of a Russian disinformation operation. No one ever admits that they were wrong or that they took things a little too far. No, the standards don’t apply to the people who insist they are applying the standards.
Fani Willis, less careful and accomplished than some of her resistance colleagues, is a particularly glaring example.
Perhaps the judge shouldn’t have left her on the case, but — given the dubious merits of the indictment and the motives for bringing it — it may be appropriate that it’s being led by a prosecutor whose reputation is so deservedly in tatters.
We have seen her like before, and as long as Trump is on the scene, we’ll see it again.