Trump and others charged with conspiring to overturn 2020 election in Georgia

[Voronwë the Faithful]

He said flat out in a text message to Merchant (who does not impress me at all) that the relationship began when both Wade and Willis were Municipal Court judges. His claim that he was just "speculating" when he said that is not credible at all. Particularly when added to the compelling cell phone evidence.

At this point if were the judge I would disqualify Willis. And it pains me to say that.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I wonder what Anthony Michael Kreis was talking about with this tweet:

[N.E. Brigand]

Andrew Flesichman, who has been pretty critical of Fani Willis throughout this process, says: "This hearing did not go well for the defense. But, if they were going to try to argue that the texts are more reliable than Bradley's in-court testimony, this would be the basis."

I continue to think that Bradley doesn't really know for sure when Wade and Willis became more than friends. I think that it's likelier than not that Wade told Bradley, after he and Willis were seriously dating, that they were seeing each other and that the two of them had met at a conference while they were both judges. I think that Bradley may have understood that to mean that they started dating at that time. I think it's possible Bradley has other information, learned under privilege, that might bolster but not prove that interpretation. I think he screwed up big time in texting Marchant that he knew that for sure and that he may get in trouble for it. I'm very curious to know how Bradley and Marchant started communicating about this matter. Did she first reach out to him? If so, what led her to believe that he might have information about this matter? (And did she know that he had been Wade's lawyer and give some consideration to privilege concerns?) Or did he first reach out to her? If so, what was his motivation for that? Just being a good citizen? In which case, why retract now under oath? Some of the defense attorneys today suggested that Bradley changed his story after hearing from a mutual friend of Wade and himself. And we know from the previous testimony that Bradley left the firm under a cloud. I think we're supposed to believe that Wade and Willis pulled a Trump and are pressuring Bradley to keep silent. But this becomes speculation on top of speculation, and meanwhile Willis and Wade -- if they are telling the truth -- are stuck trying to prove a negative.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Interesting that I Fleishman is now less bullish about Willis being disqualified than I am. My feeling is that Bradley's testimony and his text messages to Merchant are not by themselves not sufficient to prove that Willis and Wade lied about when the affair began (and whether Wade spent the night at WIllis' house). And the cell phone data that was subpoenaed from AT&T is also not by itself sufficient to do so. But each of them corroborates each other, and in combination, I find it difficult to believe that they did not lie. Perhaps Judge McAfee will see it differently than I do. He did not seem to have a lot of patience with the defense attorneys, particularly Merchant. So we'll see.

[N.E. Brigand]

Interesting that I Fleishman is now less bullish about Willis being disqualified than I am. My feeling is that Bradley's testimony and his text messages to Merchant are not by themselves sufficient to prove that Willis and Wade lied about when the affair began (and whether Wade spent the night at WIllis's house). And the cell phone data that was subpoenaed from AT&T is also not by itself sufficient to do so. But each of them corroborates each other, and in combination, I find it difficult to believe that they did not lie. Perhaps Judge McAfee will see it differently than I do. He did not seem to have a lot of patience with the defense attorneys, particularly Merchant. So we'll see.

Perhaps Judge McAfee elicited more damning testimony from Bradley in chambers and was annoyed that defense attorneys weren't asking the right questions to do so.

As for this:

I wonder what Anthony Michael Kreis was talking about with this tweet:

Wonder no more:

"When the hearing on the motion to disqualify DA Fani Willis resumed today after a short break, attorney Christopher Kachouroff, who represents Harrison Floyd, was caught on camera with no pants on right before sitting down for his cross examination. Not sure exactly why he was walking around his law office in his boxers, but obviously he has a very relaxed atmosphere."

Pictures at link!

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I wonder what Anthony Michael Kreis was talking about with this tweet:

Oh my!!!!11

Lawyer in Trump's GA Case Caught With Pants Down on Zoom!

ETA: x-posted with N.E.B., obviously.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Perhaps Judge McAfee elicited more damning testimony from Bradley in chambers and was annoyed that defense attorneys weren't asking the right questions to do so.

Particularly Merchant. She was really bad (but at least she didn't get caught without her pants).

[River]

Interesting that I Fleishman is now less bullish about Willis being disqualified than I am. My feeling is that Bradley's testimony and his text messages to Merchant are not by themselves sufficient to prove that Willis and Wade lied about when the affair began (and whether Wade spent the night at WIllis's house). And the cell phone data that was subpoenaed from AT&T is also not by itself sufficient to do so. But each of them corroborates each other, and in combination, I find it difficult to believe that they did not lie. Perhaps Judge McAfee will see it differently than I do. He did not seem to have a lot of patience with the defense attorneys, particularly Merchant. So we'll see.

Perhaps Judge McAfee elicited more damning testimony from Bradley in chambers and was annoyed that defense attorneys weren't asking the right questions to do so.

Or maybe it was always just a bunch of gossip that didn't add up to anything provable and the defense ran away with it because it was exactly the kind of stuff they wanted to hear. It wasn't until they had to actually deliver the goods that they realized they had a whole heap of nothing. In short, there's no secret knowledge. They're just a bunch of idiots who got in over their heads.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I disagree. Having watched much of the hearings, and followed closely the rest of it, I'm about 99% sure that Willis and Wade lied on the stand and had romantic relationship well before she hired him as the special prosecutor. And the only reason why there is a 1% doubt is how bad the defense attorneys have been.

[N.E. Brigand]

I disagree. Having watched much of the hearings, and followed closely the rest of it, I'm about 99% sure that Willis and Wade lied on the stand and had a romantic relationship well before she hired him as the special prosecutor. And the only reason why there is a 1% doubt is how bad the defense attorneys have been.

If you're right, and you well could be, it's just so weird that they would lie about it, because it's now been established that Fani Willis did indeed offer the job of special prosecutor to someone else first (the former governor of Georgia, no less), and only offered it to Nathan Wade after the other guy turned it down. And there has been no evidence introduced to support the claim that Willis arranged for Wade to have this job because she hoped to gain financially from it. So they could have just said that from the start.

- - - - - - - - - - -
CNN has hundreds of texts that give a partial answer to my earlier question about whether Terrance Bradley went to Ashleigh Marchant or vice versa. Whether or not Bradley was telling the truth about when their relationship started, he has secretly been pushing the disqualification effort for months. He was recommending witnesses that Merchant could subpoena and she was explicitly intending to keep him out of it until she couldn't get anyone else to say that the relationship started before 2022.

[N.E. Brigand]

We've known for at least a couple weeks now that Fulton County's computer system was hacked in late January by a ransomware operation apparently based in Russia and calling itself LockBit and that the hack "debilitated everything from the tax and water billing department to court records to phones. ... The FBI is leading the investigation, with assistance from the Georgia bureau of investigation and Homeland Security’s cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency (CISA)." That's per a Feb. 12 story in The Guardian. Consequences have included things like this:

This morning, after the high-profile arrest of an activist on Thursday on arson charges related to “Cop City” protests, the media engaged in a spirited argument with court and jail staff. Arraignments are usually done by Zoom meeting with a prisoner remaining at the jail.

But Zoom is offline. A judge was forced to trundle into Fulton county’s notorious jail to conduct the proceeding in person, yet the jail doesn’t allow visitors. Eventually, the sheriff relented and allowed some media representatives inside.

Earlier today, Anna Bower, the intrepid Lawfare reporter who's been covering the Trump case, wrote:



That said, the Guardian story says the "hack didn’t target the district attorney’s office and will not affect the Trump case, said Jeff DiSantis, a spokesperson for the office. 'All material related to the election case is kept in a separate, highly secure system that was not hacked and is designed to make any unauthorized access extremely difficult, if not impossible,' he said." But the "office has yet to respond to questions about whether evidence stored on county computers in other criminal cases might have been compromised. Notably, the Atlanta police department said it isn’t accepting emails from Fulton county email addresses for the moment, just in case."

Last week, an operation by the FBI and other agencies "involved the seizure of nearly three-dozen servers; the arrest of two alleged LockBit members; the release of a free LockBit decryption tool; and the freezing of more than 200 cryptocurrency accounts thought to be tied to the gang’s activities. The government says LockBit has claimed more than 2,000 victims worldwide and extorted over $120 million in payments." But apparently the organization has regrouped, since today, Business Insider reports, based on a long story by former CISA administrator Chris Krebs, that:

The hacking group responsible for taking down Fulton County's websites in Georgia is threatening to publish documents from the state's court system — including ones related to the criminal case against Donald Trump — unless it gets paid a ransom.

In a message posted online Saturday, in both English and Russian, the hacking group called LockBit said the stolen documents "contain a lot of interesting things and Donald Trump's court cases that could affect the upcoming US election."

The group says they'll release the documents unless paid by tomorrow, Feb. 29. Do they actually have relevant files? Will they really release them? (Krebs says that some of what the operation's leader has claimed is false.) And how would that affect the case?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

If you're right, and you well could be, it's just so weird that they would lie about it, because it's now been established that Fani Willis did indeed offer the job of special prosecutor to someone else first (the former governor of Georgia, no less), and only offered it to Nathan Wade after the other guy turned it down. And there has been no evidence introduced to support the claim that Willis arranged for Wade to have this job because she hoped to gain financially from it. So they could have just said that from the start.

I watched fomer Gov. Barnes' testimony, and it sure seemed to me that it was clear from the beginning that he was never going to be interested in the job. Whether that was clear to Willis from the get-go I don't know, and I doubt that it was some secret plan to benefit Willis. I just think that they painted themselves into a corner by claiming that the relationship didn't start until afterwards and now they are screwed (or may be).

[N.E. Brigand]

Both Anthony Kreis, who has been skeptical of efforts to disqualify Fani Willis, and Andrew Fleischman, who has generally favored disqualification, said after arguments brought by the defense in favor of disqualification that Judge McAfee seemed inclined not to disqualify Willis.

But both commentators are now appalled by the efforts of the attorney representing Willis's office, who apparently is doing his level best to lose.

[N.E. Brigand]

Yesterday and today, lawyers representing different defendants in this case asked the judge to hear testimony from two lawyers who say that Terrance Bradley told them that Fani Willis and Nathan Wade had been engaged in a romantic relationship before 2022. But if I'm reading correctly, he told them this starting in August 2023, just a month before he starting talking to Ashleigh Merchant. Not everyone will see this situation the same way, but it looks like Bradley began a deliberate campaign to hurt Willis and Wade a few months before this all burst into public view. (This doesn't mean he wasn't telling the truth, but why then?) And I'm struck by the fact that Willis and Wade have said that they broke up in summer 2023. I'm not sure what that means, but it seems more than coincidental.

[River]

Has anyone checked to see if Bradley's got some sort of vendetta with either Willis or Wade? Or if he was expecting some sort of pay off for all this? I saw something in a reddit thread about Bradley leaving Wade's firm after a sexual assault accusation. I spotted something confirmatory in the local Atlanta paper BUT it was paywalled past the first couple sentences. Why wasn't the possibility that Bradley's out for vengeance and might have some credibility issues of his own part of the discussion BEFORE he more or less collapsed on the stand?

Also, I saw somewhere that while the phone data does put Wade in Willi's current neighborhood, she didn't actually live there at the time. If that's the case, why was this rather important detail missed in all the discussion?

All in all, it's starting to feel like the criminal defendants are, at this point, just throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something sticks.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

River, Bradley has a major vendetta against Wade, his former law partner who (in all likelihood) forced Bradley out of the firm after Bradley was accused of sexually assaulting an employee.

[N.E. Brigand]

Has anyone checked to see if Bradley's got some sort of vendetta with either Willis or Wade? Or if he was expecting some sort of pay off for all this? I saw something in a reddit thread about Bradley leaving Wade's firm after a sexual assault accusation. I spotted something confirmatory in the local Atlanta paper BUT it was paywalled past the first couple sentences. Why wasn't the possibility that Bradley's out for vengeance and might have some credibility issues of his own part of the discussion BEFORE he more or less collapsed on the stand?

Also, I saw somewhere that while the phone data does put Wade in Willi's current neighborhood, she didn't actually live there at the time. If that's the case, why was this rather important detail missed in all the discussion?

All in all, it's starting to feel like the criminal defendants are, at this point, just throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something sticks.

I agree with V Bradley has a vendetta against Wade. But we don't know if the sexual harassment allegation against Bradley was true. He may feel he was unfairly forced out and -- if Wade really did tell him that the romantic relationship with Willis started before 2022 -- that his vendetta is righteous. Also some observers feel that the reason Bradley recanted was that Wade and Willis may have been threatening him. I've seen no direct evidence of that but it was the apparent intent of some questions put to Bradley on Friday.

As for evidence undermining the phone records, it is true that the fact you mention was shown last Friday on the slide presentation that was part of the prosecution's closing summary. However, I am not sure of how complete this rebuttal was. It may rule out some dates but not others.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

[N.E. Brigand]

Ashleigh Merchant testified about this case to Georgia's legislature today. Lisa Rubin describes Merchant's testimony here.

[N.E. Brigand]

Not mentioned in Lisa Rubin's coverage at that link is that Ashleigh Merchant discussed a supposed meeting between Fani Willis and Vice President Kamala Harris in D.C. in February 2023. Merchant says that she found this meeting after doing an open records search. When Merchant was asked if she had "any further explanation of why Ms. Willis was meeting with the Vice President of the United States" -- this is before Trump was indicted in Georgia -- Merchant replied that she didn't know, but she did know the mayor of Atlanta was also there. You can see the White House log at the 1:24:20 mark in this video from today's hearing. That very image shows that 456 people were in attendance, and as reporters have noted, this was a Black History Month event, Willis was just part of the large invited crowd, and she didn't meet Harris.

I think it hurts Merchant's credibility that she's playing silly games like that.