In her sometimes bizarre and often combative testimony, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis explained, “I just think men and women think differently.” At least when it comes to Pete Skandalakis, she is demonstrably correct. Serving as Willis’s replacement after her removal from the Trump case for personal misconduct in hiring her former lover as lead prosecutor, Skandalakis found the case against Trump and his associates worthy of dismissal. In so doing, he suggested (as did many of us) that the entire foundation for the case was flawed from the outset.
Some of us have been loud critics of the racketeering case brought by Willis from the outset, calling it legally and factually absurd. The loosely constructed theory placed Trump at the center of an enterprise with 18 other individuals who had little to do with each other as a group, let alone in a conspiracy.
The case was always an example of raw, open lawfare, but Willis was widely heralded by politicians and pundits for her efforts. Even when she was found to have hired her former lover, Nathan Wade, and botched the prosecution, she was lionized by the left.
The grand jury report was a mess. The case began as a virtual circus with a grand jury report that was a mess and a self-proclaimed witch as foreperson. Emily Kohrs proceeded to give spellbinding, giggling interviews touting the merits of the case.
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Skandalakis shredded the case against Trump and the other defendants, noting that it was premised on biased assumptions about individuals’ motivations. For example, he criticized Willis for charging former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and others over their statements to the Georgia Legislature. He observed that such charges “would have a chilling effect on witnesses,” and raised “serious constitutional questions” concerning free speech.
Likewise, he expressly criticized the charging of former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows over a call Trump had with Georgia election officials asking them to “find 11,780 votes.” As many of us have written, Skandalakis noted that “reasonable minds could differ as to how to interpret the call.” That call was the focus of much of the media and political support for the prosecution.
Much of the media responded to the news with a shrug and moved on after years of fawning over Willis and running misleading stories on the legal merits. Pundits who appeared nightly to support the prosecution as manifestly well-founded were nowhere to be found.
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Former prosecutor Joyce Vance said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that the prosecution “looks like a slam dunk.” Others, like former acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, praised Willis’s efforts. Laurence Tribe, who supported a litany of ridiculous charges against Trump, including attempted murder, heralded the prosecution as based on incontrovertible evidence.
The media that ignored any opposing views have moved on with the same experts to the new narrative of the death of democracy.
With the long-overdue collapse of the Georgia case, three of the four criminal prosecutions are now dead. Trump was convicted in his New York hush money case but was sentenced to no jail time. That case is still in the courts, and could also be overturned entirely.
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Willis spent millions on this effort, wasted her office’s personnel, and cost the courts copious time and effort. Yet, even with the disclosures of her misconduct and the poor handling of the case, she was reelected. She knew the mob and the media. It did not matter if she lost or spent a fortune. The pursuit of Trump remains a self-authenticating credential on the left.
Of course, there remains the status of Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro and Scott Hall, all of whom decided to cut deals to lesser charges. The deals allowed them to avoid additional costs and time without losing their licenses or incurring jail time. Such deals are not necessarily overturned by later decisions to drop a case. Indeed, they generally come with an agreement to waive appeals.
In her testimony, Willis was often unglued and unprofessional. Yet that, too, was largely ignored by a fawning media. She waved around papers, yelling, “Lies! Lies! Lies!” as the left complimented her for her defiance. At one point, she insisted that opposing counsel’s “interests are contrary to democracy, your honor, not to mine.”
The conclusion of this case only reaffirms that it was her interests alone that drove this prosecution from supporting her former lover with a huge salary to advance her political career. The people of Fulton County paid that bill and then reelected her.
Even Emily Kohrs got her 15 minutes of fame, seemingly bewitched by the process, which she described as “really cool. . . . I got 60 seconds of eye contact with everyone who came in the room. You can tell a lot about people in that 60 seconds.” She expressed how “insanely excited” she was for the chance to play a role in the indictments. At the end of the case, only the insanity remained.
