The sleazefest in Atlanta

The WAPO has a grimly hilarious expose of Fani Willis’s and Nathan Wade’s excellent adventure.

One way to see how wildly improper Willis’s conduct has been is to simply reverse the genders of the power couple at the center of this mess.

Suppose the Fulton County District Attorney had funneled a half million dollars of public money to his girlfriend, by appointing her as an independent contractor over vastly more qualified career prosecutors in his own office, to run a case she was flagrantly unqualified to run, which just happened to be the most important case in the history of the jurisdiction. Now suppose his girlfriend then “took” the DA on lavish vacations. paid for by the public money he was funneling to her. Then suppose she testified subsequently that he had paid her back for those trips, but there wasn’t any record of those payments, because he had made them in cash.

The point of the gender reversal is that the notion that Wade was paying for those trips, as opposed to the unwitting public, is made momentarily plausible by the cultural norm that the man pays for these sorts of shenanigans. By contrast, if the woman is “paying,” it becomes instantly obvious who is really paying for this stuff.

I can understand, given the star defendant in this case, why people are blinding themselves to what Willis did, but what she did has wrecked this case. (Giving a speech at a church defending herself in regard to her affair with Wade, thereby handing the defense plenty of ammunition to make arguments about a tainted jury pool even before a jury begins to be selected, was a nice additional touch).

There’s now going to be no trial before the election, which is probably for the best, since Willis’s and Wade’s conduct has probably made it impossible to convict Trump in any event.