The Greatest Show on Earth returns today in Fulton County, Georgia, but it’s tough to see how it could possibly top its opening day. Fani Willis was supposed to return to the witness stand today to continue her testimony in the motion to disqualify her and her former boyfriend Nathan Wade from the RICO case against Donald Trump et al. But someone in the Fulton County DA’s office just called an audible:
Fulton County prosecutors will not call District Attorney Fani Willis to the witness stand for additional questioning Friday, after she forcefully defended herself and accused defense attorneys of lying as part of a bid to disqualify her and her office from prosecuting the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald Trump. …
Prosecutors in her office still plan to call at least three witnesses to answer questions Friday, including her father.
Today was supposed to provide Willis her turn to explain herself. Instead, it may be that her team decided that putting her on the stand was a disaster that needed to be stopped regardless of the potential benefits. That’s a case of closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted. And did it ever.
The theory behind the DQ motion is that Willis appointed Wade and paid exorbitant fees in order to personally benefit from the funds in the form of gifts and travel. Willis and Wade both admitted that they did not disclose the relationship as required by regulations, and Willis conceded yesterday that she violated the prohibition on receiving gifts as a public official over a cumulative amount of $100.
Willis had an explanation for the allegation, however. She testified that she keeps large sums of cash at her house at all times, and that she reimbursed Wade as they went along on the trips from that stash. Defense attorney Ashleigh Merchant pressed her on whether she had bank records for withdrawals for the case, but Willis insisted that the cash didn’t come to her through banks.
Instead, she explained, she kept thousands of dollars from contributions to one of her electoral campaigns — seemingly an admission of an entirely new reason to disqualify Willis:
Willis told Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney working on behalf of GOP political operative Mike Roman, that it is her standard practice to keep cash on hand.
“But I always have cash at the house. That has been, I don’t know, all my life. If you’re a woman and you go on a date with a man, you better have $200 in your pocket so if that man acts up, you can go where you want to go. So I keep cash in my house,” Willis said.
“So my question was, where did that cash originally come from? If it came out of the bank?” Merchant then asked.
“Cash is fungible. I’ve had cash for years in my house. So for me to tell you the source of where it comes from, when you go to Publix and you buy something, you get $50, you throw it in there. It’s been my whole life,” Willis replied. “When I took out a large amount of money on my first campaign, I kept some of the cash of that. Like, to tell you I just have cash in my house, I don’t have as much today as I would normally have, but I’m building back up now.”
This was hardly the only problem that Willis created for herself in yesterday’s testimony. Those began when she stormed into the courtroom and abruptly reversed her objection to a subpoena to testify after Nathan Wade’s embarrassing testimony. Willis insisted she didn’t watch any of it, but began accusing everyone in the courtroom of lying and disrupting the proceedings with emotional filibusters about her experiences as a black woman.
This admission of conversion of campaign funds, especially in cash, could land her in legal trouble of another kind. First off, most states forbid such personal conversions of campaign funds to anything other than another campaign. Does Georgia allow candidates to simply take the cash home and use it for personal purchases? I doubt it, but we may soon find out.
Second problem: Even if Georgia law allows such personal conversions of campaign cash to personal use, it raises an issue about Willis’ income tax status. That cash would have to be reported to the IRS and Georgia’s revenue office as income. Did Willis report that cash and pay taxes on it? Maybe, but we also heard about a tax lien on Willis’ property that remained unresolved during the period that Willis claimed to be reimbursing Wade through her cash stash (or “hoard,” as one of the other defense attorneys put it).
Something tells me this won’t be the last day that Willis finds herself on the stand in a courtroom.
Ironically, though, the cash explanation might just work, former prosecutor Philip Holloway writes in a Fox News column today. As embarrassing as it may be, Judge Scott McAfee may have no other choice but to accept that explanation, absent any evidence to the contrary. But that’s not the end of this matter either, Holloway warns:
But the biggest embarrassment for Fani Willis is the cash. The big issue that the defense needed to prove is that Willis was personally enriched financially by virtue of Wade having paid for luxury travel including Caribbean cruises and trips to Napa wine country.
And here is the big embarrassment: Willis and Wade testified in lockstep with each other that Willis reimbursed her lover in cash. Untraceable, undocumented cold hard cash.
Fani Willis is either a terrible witness or a brilliant witness, depending on how you see things. But she is likely to nevertheless prevail on this issue. Why? Because the judge may be stuck with her claim she repaid Wade in cash.
Willis and Wade are not out of the woods yet, however. There are still the issues of whether either or both have lied to the court about when their affair began and whether there has been other prosecutorial misconduct by virtue of a multitude of extrajudicial public comments that allegedly were made to deny a fair trial to the defendants.
It would be ironic to let Willis off the hook for passing cash around in manners more commonly seen in RICO cases … just so that she can prosecute a RICO case that doesn’t actually allege any financial benefit to the conspiracy. As for Holloway’s final point, Willis’ black-woman defense to all allegations yesterday may go a very long way in proving just how much Willis wants to poison the jury pool on the basis of race.
Will today’s testimony from the DA’s office match the fireworks of yesterday? We’ll see, but let’s keep popping the popcorn and see if Willis’ team learned anything about the First Rule of Holes from her first day on the stand. It seems that Willis herself finally may have.