Fani Willis

From the Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Resurrection Church Oakland (PCA) held this event last week.

In related news, spectacularly unethical Fulton County prosecutor Fani Willis sent an angry letter to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee today. She is furious that the committee is quite appropriately investigating the degree to which her part of the “Get Trump!” lawfare last year was orchestrated and coordinated with the Biden Administration.

“Rather than honor and uphold the oath you took, you have chosen to expend your time attempting to bully me, which is a complete waste of your time,” Willis wrote. “Might I suggest that instead of attempting to disrupt this office’s work protecting the people of Fulton County, that you celebrate Black History Month by visiting children in your district to teach them about the many contributions African Americans have made to this country—including those who have advanced democracy by successfully advocating that this nation live up to its ideals that everyone is equal before the law and everyone has the right to have their voice heard through exercising their right to vote. That would be a much more productive use of your time.”

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Pointer: Not The Bee.

The Nathan Wade Interview: Apparently Fulton County Lawyers Don’t Get That “Legal Ethics” Thingy…or Ethics Generally

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I find the transcript of the interview of deposed Fani Willis prosecutor and loverboy Nathan Wade many things: damning, outrageous, disgusting, shocking. Mostly I find it to be more evidence that I have wasted the last 25 years trying to make the legal profession more ethical. This guy, a “prominent and respected Atlanta lawyer,” not only doesn’t know what ethics is, he’s infuriatingly smug about his ignorance.

These are the people Democrats have placed in charge of “saving democracy” by using the criminal laws to keep Donald Trump from delivering condign justice to the Biden presidency, as in crushing, unequivocal defeat.

On Sunday’s “World News Tonight” and Monday’s “Good Morning America” ABC revealed two segments (here and here) from an “exclusive” interview with former Fulton County, Georgia special prosecutor Nathan Wade. He was, you’ll recall, forced to withdraw from the lucrative gig gifted to him by his girlfriend Fani Willis by the judge in the case, Willis’s prosecution of Donald Trump for “election interference.”

If there are more segments, I think I’ll pass: cleaning up the serial head explosions caused by what I’ve seen already is more than enough for me. Nothing in them could change my mind about Wade (or Willis) at this point. He’s not just an unethical lawyer.He’s a fick. And an asshole.

I’ll just repeat some of the more glaring statements so you get the idea:

  • Asked how he could endanger a high profile prosecution by letting an illicit romance pollute the prosecution: “You don’t plan to develop feelings. You don’t plan to fall in love. You don’t plan to  have some relationship in the workplace that we  you don’t set out to do that and those things develop organically. They develop over  over time. And the  the minute we had that sobering moment, we discontinued it.”

I see: he’s 13 years old, then….just so darned romantic or horny that he couldn’t help himself, even though this was exactly the opposite of professional behavior. Continue reading →

Fani Wallis Scandal Footnote: A ‘Bias Makes Legal Ethicists Stupid’ Moment

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is disheartening, though not unexpected.

I have written about how thoroughly my colleagues in the legal ethics field are politicized, biased and frequently rendered unable to see the ethical issues through the fog of their peer-reinforced distortions. Yesterday, as my legal ethics expert listserv was buzzing with commentary on the judge’s “split the baby” response to Fulton County Fani Willis’s screaming conflict of interest, prosecutorial misconduct, race-baiting and stunning arrogance. One prominent lawyer in the field, a woman whose commentary is usually perceptive, wrote this in part…

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Update: I Was Wrong! The Fulton Superior Court Judge ‘Split the Baby’…

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

Judge Scott McAfee ruled that either District Attorney Fani Willis has to step down or her boyfriend David Wade has to leave the prosecution team. You can read the opinion here. Given the circumstances, this is the best outcome Willis could have reasonably hoped for, and yet I think it also is a gift to Trump. I doubt that Willis will step down, and if she remains, the stench of her conduct, arrogance and likely perjured testimony will cripple her case.

I thought that the judge would have to sever Willis from the case, but he did not. The decision is widely being seen as a political one, preserving the judge’s chances of re-election (which would have been harmed if he was tarred a racist, which Willis’s fans would undoubtedly set out to do), avoiding the accusations of partisanship and corruption if he did nothing, and appearing to be measured and fair. I’ve seen many analysts compare McAfee’s opinion to Robert Hur’s schizophrenic report on Biden’s misuse of classified documents, and James Comey’s wrist slap on Hillary Clinton for her secret server shenanigans, being sharply critical of Willis and then letting her off the metaphorical hook.

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Friday Open Forum: Waiting to See If I’m Right…

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

Judge Scott McAfee confirmed yesterday that he will announce the fate of Fulton County’s designated “Stop Trump!” agent Fani Willis some time today. From the moment your friendly neighborhood ethicist heard the basic facts in this annoying story I was convinced that one way or the other she would have to leave the Trump case. One of my legal ethics colleagues emphatically disagrees, arguing that whatever conflicts of interest she created by hiring her illicit boyfriend to help prosecute Trump were matters of legal ethics discipline but irrelevant to the defendants. He also pooh-poohed the “appearance of impropriety” issue, echoing the American Bar Association’s logic when it took that category out of the ethics rules: actual impropriety matters, the mere appearance doesn’t.

Yet Willis is a government attorney, and employees of the state are required to avoid the appearance of impropriety because it erodes the public trust. If there was ever a prosecution that mandated a squeaky clean leader beyond suspicion or reproach, this is it. Instead, Willis has left an odoriferous trail of conflicts, arrogance, hypocrisy, dubious explanations and likely lies, all supported by her obnoxious reliance on race-baiting. I have been certain that she would eventually go down for all of this, and that my learned friend–who is apolitical— as well as the my myriad partisan-biased colleagues in the legal ethics association I belong to are wrong.

Well, we shall see . If you see Fredo (“I’m smart! I’m not dumb like everybody says!”) leading off a post today, you’ll know I was right.

Meanwhile, talk about whatever interests you in the Wonderful World of Ethics.

Still More Law and Ethics Matters

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Boy, the laws and ethics intersection has been almost constantly in the news lately, led by the Fani Willis controversy in Georgia, which apparently will turn on whether the judge believes the justly beleaguered Fulton County DA really paid half of her paramour and co-Trump prosecutor’s expenses on various platonic < cough> trips and cruises in cash, though there’s no record of such payments. Willis’s father even took the stand to explain that keeping huge amounts of cash on hand is “a black thing.” I did not know that!

As Alice would say, “Curiouser and curiouser!” Then we have much ferment in the legal world over whether the New York County Supreme Court’s order for Donald Trump to pay an unprecedented $355 million for inflating asset values in statements of his financial condition submitted to lenders and insurers was just, cruel and unusual punishment, a bill of attainder, or self-evident partisan lawfare. Gov. Kathy Hochul didn’t help matters by trying to justify the award by saying that Trump is special (wink,wink) and we all know what that means when coming from a Democrat. I confess, I don’t know the New York law involved well enough to weigh in on this one, but the verdict certainly adds to the weight of evidence that there is a full-on press to use the courts to crush Trump before he can crush Joe Biden.

There were two non-Trump law and ethics stories recently worth pondering.

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Friday Open Forum

/ Jack Marshall / 32 Comments

My sister, a rational liberal except on the topics of Donald Trump and Wuhan masks, now ends every phone conversation we have as it drifts into current affairs by exclaiming “Everything’s going to Hell! I can’t stand it!” and hanging up.

Speaking of damnation, did anyone take the time to watch the hearing yesterday (continuing today) on the Fani Willis conflict of interest allegations? Nothing happened that would justify an ethics post, although the episode again demonstrated that we have no news media organizations that can be trust to convey objectively any event with partisan implications.

Then there’s this from NBC: “Aides and allies close to former President Trump have discussed the former president giving the official Republican response to President Joe Biden’s March 7 State of the Union address…two of the sources said that Trump himself has discussed it, but both said he is leaning against the high-profile gig.” 

Why wouldn’t the GOP do that, and why in the world would Trump not want to? Normally, nobody pays much attention to the rebuttals, because, among other things, they aren’t rebuttals but rather per-determined speeches usually delivered by blah elected officials. A Trump response would be boffo political theater, especially since in another month Joe might be reciting nursery rhymes.

But these are the things going through my fevered brain right now.

Write about any ethics topic running through yours.

There is Hope! Part 1, Introduction: the Vindication of Waylon Bailey

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Several things make this particular story necessary this morning. Most of all, it’s an ethics story with a happy ending. I’ve been hearing from several EA readers of late (and a lapsed, much missed commenter who had dropped out) who tell me that they the blog too depressing. So do I, which I suppose means that I need to perk up my tone and perspective a bit. I am generally able to muster enthusiasm and optimism, but I know that’s a bias that sometimes makes me naive. It’s sometimes difficult for me to distinguish between my reaction to some ethics tale that is objectively disturbing and the emotional hangover various crises I been wading through almost non-stop since early in 2020. I promise to do better.

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Your Fani Willis Fiasco Update…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

1. I had a long conversation with a close friend who is a retired lifetime federal prosecutor. She really detests Donald Trump, to the extent that she said she was initially “excited” about the Georgia case against him because, as a state prosecution, it would not be vulnerable to a presidential pardon. Now she says she is thoroughly disgusted with Willis, whom she termed an “idiot” for…

  • Hiring a lawyer to work on the case who would be using the fruits of his job to pay for benefits to her, what she called the equivalent of a kickback;
  • Having an intimate relationship with such a lawyer, which not only calls into question the reasons he was hired, but also her independent judgment regarding the case generally, since if he and she are benefiting from the case continuing, she sould not apply the required “independent judgment” to determine how to pursue the case or even whether to pursue it;
  • Doing this despite knowing that it would be a high profile case under constant scrutiny, requiring “Caesar’s wife” level, squeaky-clean management on her part;
  • Immediately “playing the “race card” as soon as her conflicts were raised in the court filing, when she knew or should have known that the ethics complaints have substance;
  • Creating a textbook “appearance of impropriety,” which as a government lawyer Willis had to know was taboo.

At very least, she agreed, Nathan Wade should have withdrawn from the case (or been removed by Willis) as soon as this controversy arose. That he has not, she said, proves that Willis is conflicted and her judgment is not trustworthy. My freind says the Georgia case is likely done-for, and that its demise will increase public skepticism about the legitimacy of the other cases being pursued against Trump. She also opines that even if Willis somehow is able to stay at the helm of the case, she is clearly such an incompetent that she will botch it in some other way.

I concur with all of the above.

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A “Nah, There’s No Mainstream Media Bias” Classic: CBS Reports on the Fani Willis Scandal

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Now that the anti-Trump, Democrat propaganda-promoting, biased and incompetent mainstream media has been forced to cover the unfolding Fani Willis ethics debacle that threatens to swallow her partisan “Get Trump!” prosecution, it is giving us blazing examples of just how untrustworthy its coverage can be. The headline above looms over CBS’s “news” story that is really a lame and transparent effort to try to spin the Fulton County DA out of the mess of her own making.

The focus of the report is that poor Fani just about had to hire her lover as one of the prosecutors in the high profile case against Donald Trump, because she was “unable to find someone in the DA’s office with the stature and credentials needed for the case,” and “turned to at least two other legal heavy hitters in Atlanta who turned the job down.” Then the article, while conceding that Nathan Wade had little relevant experience, tells us that Wade was Willis’s “friend and mentor” <cough!> and that she told colleagues he “had the toughness to handle the scorched-earth legal tactics that Trump’s lawyers and their co-counsel were likely to employ in the legal battle.” You know, because Trump is such an evil bastard.

Then the article explains that…

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