Here is Robin Abcarian on Atlanta DA Fani Willis:
After watching her testify for nearly two hours on Thursday, I think she made a convincing case that she did not [do anything wrong]. If anything, she spent more money on him than he did on her.
But by engaging in a romantic relationship with Wade (and believing she was under no obligation to disclose it), she handed her opponents — on a golden platter — an opening to challenge her integrity.... It’s mind-boggling. And so, so disappointing.
I'm not saying Abcarian is either right or wrong about this. But it's a perfect example of the hack gap I was talking about yesterday. Abcarian concludes that Willis did nothing wrong, but nonetheless spends the next thousand words wringing her hands over Willis's "bad judgment."
I know it can get tedious to ask, "What if it was a Republican?" But go ahead. Ask. There would be no hand-wringing. Quite the contrary: every single Republican with a pulse would be fighting back relentlessly over "Democrat smears." They'd be digging up dirt on the lawyer and her clients who questioned Willis. Donald Trump would be writing ALL CAPS Truth Social rants about the unfairness of a justice system that allows a travesty like this.
But not us! The fact is that Willis really didn't do anything wrong. Office romances may not always be a great idea, but they're common as dirt. The only problem is that Willis brought charges against a guy named Michael Roman for organizing slates of fake electors in the 2020 election, and it so happens that Roman has had a long career as an oppo investigator for the Koch network and then for Donald Trump. So he put his skills to work looking for dirt:
When fellow conservative operatives wrote on X that Roman was “the guy who busted Fani Willis” and that his 127-page court filing was “an object lesson in why you don’t indict the oppo guy,” he clicked like on the posts.
Over a career as a political operative and investigator, including for the conservative Koch brothers’ network, he has been described as intensely private and driven in his work. He has hired former CIA analysts to train his staff, arranged for drones to surveil campaign rallies and used military terminology, according to former colleagues. While working for Trump in 2020, he recruited poll-watchers for what the campaign called the “Army for Trump,” oversaw election-day operations and played a key role in organizing the “alternate elector plan” that is central to the charges in Fulton County, records show.
Even after employing his legendary skills, Roman found nothing except the office romance. But he decided to take a flyer on a long-shot accusation of financial impropriety against Willis anyway.¹ Why not?
It's bogus, and under normal circumstances none of us would care even slightly about Willis's onetime relationship with Wade. It would be a throwaway line in profiles and nothing more. There's just nothing there. But because an aggrieved oppo researcher's lawyer filed a tortured, bank-shot complaint and Fox News rallied around, suddenly we're all taking it seriously. Why?
¹It's worth keeping in mind just how ridiculous the accusation is. Basically, Willis and Wade both paid for various things during their relationship. But Roman's lawyer has pointed solely to the items paid for by Wade and touted this as evidence that Willis benefited from gifts given by Wade. It's completely absurd.
Kevin's central question here is why Ds go into tongue-clucking mode about something that's so transparently a steaming hunk of manufactured horseshit, where Rs will uniformly go into attack mode.
Let me propose something I haven't seen before: Ds ultimately want to be aboveboard and to be right about the facts-- it's important to us to be clean and to be accurate, and getting a full enough picture takes time. We don't want to be on the record siding with something underhanded or wrong, and the record is always going to be there.
For Rs it's all about the tribe-- they need to be with their tribe and don't care about any record. They know they can always explain away whatever turns out to be wrong, and they can always change the facts too. So nothing that's on any record matters worth a damn-- it's all about the tribe, in the moment.
From Wikipedia:
During the 2020 campaign, Roman echoed Trump’s claims of voting fraud. In July of that year, he tweeted that Democrat Joe Biden and others were recruiting “goons to steal the election.”
Investigators from the U.S. House January 6 Committee asked Roman whether he had evidence of widespread fraud that had affected the outcome of the election. He declined to answer, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
I come here too often to only criticize Kevin, so, want to take this post to say that I agree 1000% with his take on this FW "scandal". Thanks Kevin!
In its glorious messiness, I must say that I believe her testimony. Completely. I believe that the affair started after he worked in this position. I believe that she paid for her stuff in cash. I believe that this was a short term fling and it's over. This represents zero conflict of interest with respect to the defendants. The rest is just smearing her.