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‘Smell of Desperation’: Legal Experts Slam State and Federal Republicans Pushing to Discipline or Derail DA Fani Willis
Warning of possible violence and “civil war,” an allegation of “Nazism,” and calling to pass laws and hold hearings, Republican lawmakers at the state and federal level are working to delegitimize, derail, discipline, or defund Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and her prosecution of Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants. Some legal experts are calling it “dangerous,” and “a recipe for constitutional crisis.”
“Do you want a civil war? I don’t want a civil war. I don’t want to have to draw my rifle,” Georgia Republican state Senator Colton Moore told Steve Bannon, as Raw Story reported (video below). “I want to make this problem go away with my legislative means of doing so, and the first step to getting that done is defunding Fani Willis of any Georgia tax dollars.”
Moore added, “it’s just like Nazi Germany. I mean, they want to call us the Nazis and their actions are Nazism.”
Having a sitting state senator talking about the need to “draw his rifle” as the alternative to a lack of a legislative response to the Fulton County indictments is a threat of political violence better suited for nineteenth century redeemers than 2023. pic.twitter.com/6OryNaZZUv
— Anthony Michael Kreis (@AnthonyMKreis) August 30, 2023
Moore is not alone.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports the “Republican-led effort to reprimand District Attorney Fani Willis after she brought charges against former President Donald Trump in Fulton County is poised to expand, as state and federal lawmakers pursue new efforts to sanction the prosecutor.”
“State Senate Majority Leader Steve Gooch said in an interview that Republican leaders could hold legislative hearings into whether Willis is using ‘her position in a political manner’ after accusing Trump and his allies of a complex conspiracy.”
Trump and his co-defendants are all charged with racketeering, or RICO, related to alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which Willis calls a “criminal enterprise.” Trump faces 13 charges, as does his former attorney Rudy Giuliani. Other defendants face a variety of charges.
“We believe she is definitely tainted,” Gooch says of Willis. “She’s politicizing this, and we want to make sure these people get a fair trial and a fair shake.”
He told the AJC “that he sees Senate Bill 92, a new law that empowers a state panel to investigate and oust wayward prosecutors, as a powerful ‘tool in the toolbox’ that Trump’s allies can deploy to delve into Willis’ use of public resources.”
U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), known for wearing an assault rifle lapel pin, co-sponsoring the federal vigilante “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and calling the January 6 insurrection a “normal tourist visit,” now “wants to use an upcoming appropriations bill to slash federal funding for Willis, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and federal special counsel Jack Smith. Each is a top prosecutor in one of the four cases Trump is currently facing.”
Georgia Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene “is among the GOP members who urged the House Judiciary Committee to launch an investigation into how much her office receives in federal dollars and whether it has interacted with White House officials,” the AJC also reports.
Legal experts are waving the red flag.
READ MORE: Tennessee House Speaker Silences One Expelled Democrat, Pushes Another
“It’s the smell of desperation: attacking prosecutors when a defendant has no defense to stand on,” says professor of law Joyce Vance, the well-known MSNBC legal analyst former U.S. Attorney. “But in Georgia, it’s being taken to new and dangerous levels. Impossible to view this as anything other than an effort by Georgia GOP to place Trump above the law.”
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin adds, “GA legislators are now openly and loudly discussing how to punish Fani Willis. Why? Because she dared to come for the king.”
“Keep your eyes on how they deploy SB 92 once October comes,” Rubin adds.
Georgia Public Broadcasting has called SB 92 the “divisive district attorney oversight bill,” which “would create a commission with power to remove district attorneys.”
Criminal law professor Carissa Byrne Hessick, pointing to that new law, writes: “Publicly stating that your new commission to discipline and remove prosecutors is an easier way to interfere in the Trump prosecution doesn’t seem like it will help your side of the pending constitutional litigation over that commission.”
Professor of law at the Georgia State University College of Law, Anthony Michael Kreis, says: “To be clear: Three institutions and three juries determined crimes may have happened here: the January 6th Committee, the United States DOJ, a federal grand jury, the Fulton DA, and two Fulton County grand juries— plus a federal court ruling on the crime-fraud exception.”
He continues, warning: “If, despite that, legislators believe DA Willis should be removed for malfeasance, then they’re simply arguing to replace home rule with their own political judgment. That’s not countenanced by the Georgia Constitution or the rule of law. It’s a recipe for constitutional crisis.”
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A MAGA “civil war” is playing out across the right-wing ecosystem, sapping attention from the ideas that once powered the base and held GOP leaders to power. Now, the movement appears more consumed by infighting than achieving political goals.
MAGA is being drained of “its political muscle, leaving it defenseless as the Trump administration revisits policies previously opposed by the base,” according to Axios. The strength of MAGA “lies in its ability to rally influencers, politicians and activists behind a hard-charging conservative agenda.” But that “superpower is faltering amid a cascade of bitter personal feuds.”
The National Pulse’s editor-in-chief Raheem J. Kassam told Axios, “There’s no focus on anything philosophical or even ideological right now.”
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“It’s all just a cacophony of grifters tussling over audience and ego,” Kassam said. “So, corporate America gets to wield power with the admin virtually unencumbered by scrutiny from the base.”
Serving up a series of examples, Axios reported that on issues such as artificial intelligence, marijuana, Venezuela, and redistricting — all of which “would have triggered significant MAGA backlash” earlier — there has been “mostly crickets.”
Trump reportedly will loosen federal regulations on marijuana soon — an act that once would have attracted MAGA influencers to scream about “pothead culture,” Axios noted. This time, however, the news “barely made a ripple on right-wing social media.”
The “America First” president seizing a tanker loaded with Venezuelan oil and refusing to rule out boots on the ground to overthrow the Maduro regime “barely pinged on MAGA’s radar.”
MAGA influencer CJ Pearson told Axios that “the movement is wholly consumed right now on personality clashes. That is a recipe for electoral doom, and it’s unfortunate to see the unity that we saw after Charlie [Kirk]’s death dissipate so quickly.”
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Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Fulton County, Georgia, demanding records related to the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden.
Trump “has increasingly pressured his administration to find widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, despite those claims having been debunked and dismissed in dozens of cases by the courts,” The Washington Post reported.
The lawsuit calls for Fulton County to hand over to DOJ “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election in Fulton County.”
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Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, according to the Post. “indirectly and without evidence accused Georgia officials of ‘vote dilution'” in a statement.
“States have the statutory duty to preserve and protect their constituents from vote dilution,” Dhillon said.
“At this Department of Justice,” Dhillon added, “we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws. If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Trump in a recorded telephone call told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in January 2021, “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
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Two years later, a Georgia grand jury indicted Trump on racketeering charges. The case ultimately was recently dismissed after setbacks and that Trump, having since become a sitting president, could not be indicted.
Democracy Docket, which covers voting rights, elections, and the courts, called the move “a major escalation in the Trump administration’s dangerous effort to revive President Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen.”
The news site also reported that Kristin Nabers, the state director for All Voting is Local, said in a statement: “This administration’s unending obsession with the 2020 election results in Georgia uses outright lies to compensate for the fact that they lost.”
“With this terrible overstep of power, the DOJ is now weaponizing laws meant to protect voters for their political vendetta,” Nabers added.
Larry Sabato, Director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics called it “More insane nonsense.”
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Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s “signature” weave — where he goes off-script and off-topic — is not working for Americans when it comes to affordability.
That’s according to CBS News correspondent John Dickerson, writing at The Atlantic.
His weave was “on display” this week during a speech that the White House promoted as focused remarks on the economy, but his comments included, Dickerson noted, “the topics of tariffs, U.S. Steel, fracking, wind turbines, electric-vehicle mandates, immigration, crime, gender policies, Obamacare, the Fed, his election victories, rare-earth negotiations, a D.C. terror attack, and ‘the lips that don’t stop’ of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.”
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The problem, he noted is, “now that the engine of the U.S. economy is smoking, the American people are looking for a technician, not an improv comic.”
Trump is hitting “a wall of resentment,” according to Dickerson, who pointed to a Politico poll which, he noted, found that “nearly half of voters—including 37 percent of Trump’s own 2024 coalition—said that the cost of living is the ‘worst they can ever remember.'”
There’s more.
“Only 31 percent of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, a new AP/NORC poll found, down from 40 percent in March,” he reported. “It’s the lowest economic approval that AP/NORC has registered in either of Trump’s two terms. In a recent CBS News/YouGov survey, a majority of respondents said that his policies are driving up food and grocery prices.”
During times of crisis other presidents have worked to get results:
“Franklin D. Roosevelt passed 15 major bills in 100 days. Ronald Reagan, in the teeth of double-digit unemployment, pushed for sweeping tax cuts week after week. Bill Clinton built an economic ‘war room’ before he even took office, and his team introduced what has now become a political cliché: focusing ‘like a laser beam’ on the economy. Barack Obama instituted a morning economic briefing that put the issue on par with national security. Each practiced the same principle: If you can’t solve the problem fast, at least get caught trying.”
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He say that now, Trump is trying. “Kind of.”
Despite talking about “affordability” during his Pennsylvania speech, he also knocked it.
“The president’s most focused message on affordability is that affordability concerns are a hoax. He used that word, or an equivalent, several times on Tuesday, as he has in Oval Office remarks, in a Cabinet meeting, and on social media.”
The “unavoidable truth, no matter how hard you weave,” Dickerson wrote, is that “his argument is weak because he has to overcome people’s lived experience.”
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Image via Reuters
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