Willis hearing must-watch TV we didn't need to see
The spectacle that unfolded in an Atlanta courtroom over whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from prosecuting Donald Trump was “My Cousin Vinny” meets “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” — equal parts bad lawyering and let-it-all-hangout behavior more suited to reality TV than a real-life courtroom.
In the end, Willis probably isn't going to be ousted from overseeing the 2020 election interference case in Georgia, and she shouldn't be. Her mesmerizing performance, including bursting into the courtroom to announce that she wanted to testify even as her own lawyer was arguing against that step, may have turned the tide in her favor — shades of Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh's unhinged fury in 2018.
It also helped that the lead lawyer on the other side seemed incapable of eliciting basic factual information from witnesses that might have buttressed the case against Willis and Nathan Wade, her erstwhile boyfriend/current chief special prosecutor.
The courtroom scene became day-long cable news fare after Willis, the prosecutor overseeing a sprawling conspiracy case to steal the election in Georgia, was alleged to have been in a longterm relationship with Wade, the prosecutor she brought in to supervise the case, at a cost to Georgia taxpayers of $650,000 and counting.
Robin Bryant-Yeartie, Willis's onetime friend and former employee in the district attorney's office (does anyone get hired on merit around here?) asserted that she had seen Willis and Wade canoodling in the years leading up to his hiring; she had “no doubt” that their romantic relationship began shortly after they met at a judicial conference in 2019. That testimony, if credited, would mean that the pair lied under oath when they denied any such entanglement before Willis brought Wade on as special prosecutor.
With Wade and Willis forcefully denying that their romantic entanglement predated his hiring, and an absence of real corroboration on the other side, the assertion that they lied to the court fizzled.
Likewise, the suggestion that Willis benefited from the Wade's hiring because he underwrote their vacations from Aruba to Napa to the Bahamas to Belize. (You might wonder whether these prosecutors had more pressing work to do.) Wade and Willis insisted that she repaid him — conveniently, in cash — and, again, there was a dearth of evidence to the contrary.
Still, the performance tarnished Willis, and while she portrayed herself as the victim of “lies,” she is primarily the victim of her own bad judgment. Even assuming that nothing was going on between Willis and Wade before she brought him into the DA's office, the notion that you shouldn't be sleeping with your subordinate seems never to have entered Willis's mind. Don't expose your office — much less a high-profile case — to snickering, and worse.
That she only started sleeping with Wade after she hired him isn't a defense. It's an indictment. “I certainly will not be choosing people to date that work under me,” she said in a 2020 campaign appearance. That was a promise worth keeping.
Some Democrats and other Trump critics, tired of the former president's bombastic antics, will no doubt welcome Willis's fearless pushback. “You think I'm on trial,” Willis told Ashleigh Merchant, the lawyer for co-defendant Michael Roman who raised the questions of her relationship with Wade. “These people are on trial for trying to steal an election in 2020,” Willis said, pointing to the flotilla of defense lawyers. “I'm not on trial, no matter how hard you try to put me on trial.”
Striking in magenta, Willis raised her voice. She accused Merchant of lying. She told Trump's defense lawyer that she had “very limited contact” with Wade because he “had a form of cancer that makes your allegation somewhat ridiculous,” adding, “I'm not going to emasculate a Black man.”
For some, this is a “you go, girl” moment. But talk about TMI. Is the Willis defense really that she didn't have sex with Wade because he couldn't?
This was must-see TV that no one should have had to watch. Things we don't want to know about our prosecutors: That their 50th birthdays “sucked.” That they favor Gray Goose over fine wine. That they have some particular views about the differences between the sexes — and poor taste in men. Wade, Willis explained, “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.'” This is the person she brought in to oversee the prosecution?
To imagine that Willis struck a blow for strong Black women, or women in general, is to misapprehend the reality of her testimony and the larger situation. By engaging in conduct that allowed her sex life to become an issue, she played right into Donald Trump's sexist hands. He consistently reduces women to the level of their sexuality and attractiveness.
Wade, Willis observed at one point, is “a Southern gentleman — me, not so much.” This may be what lawyers call an admission against interest.