Debunking the Media Hit Job on Prosecutors Fani Willis and Nathan Wade

Recently I’ve written two posts lamenting how our mainstream media are failing our people and our democracy, big time. (See this post and this one.) In the run-up to the New Hampshire primary, the two mainstays of our MSM did it again. The NYT and WaPo both served up a media hit job on two prosecutors who are fighting to bring Trump to justice for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The hit job was reportedly prepared by lawyer for a Trump co-defendant, not even Trump himself or his own staff. Its nub is the allegation of a romantic relationship between Fani Willis, the Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney, and Nathan Wade, one of three lawyers she hired as co-counsel to help prosecute her case against Trump and others.

The main WaPo piece on the subject is actually one of the more complete ones factually. But it goes so far as to say—in just its third paragraph—that accusations that Willis and Wade are lovers and that he paid for their joint vacation travel, if true, “could present a conflict of interest or could amount to fraud.”

In what legal universe is this even plausibly possible? There is no conflict of interest between people working on the same side of the same case, as Willis and Wade are working on the Trump prosecution.

I would argue that, if they sleep together, the public of Georgia gets an unusual benefit. If their “pillow talk” includes discussions of the case, they are unlikely to jump out of bed to record the number of minutes of each bedtime discussion for billing purposes. So the good people of Georgia get this much of their joint effort “off the clock,” without charge. And if Willis and Wade are like most of us, they get some of their best ideas while waking from or falling into slumber.

In order to gin up a conflict of interest, let alone fraud, you would have to prove that Willis paid Wade as a special prosecutor solely or primarily for the purpose of giving him money to spend on their joint travel. How in hell do you prove that? With an abject, tearful breakdown of one or the other on the witness stand, of the type that once happened routinely in the old Perry Mason TV series but never happens in a real courtroom?

To prove a conflict of interest or fraud, you would have to assume the darkest intentions on the part of one or both of these experienced prosecutors and find some way to prove the evil you assume to lie within them in a court of law. Good luck with that!

This is one of many examples showing why our MSM need to have good lawyers on tap to vet legal stories before their publication. The claim that an alleged love affair and joint travel between co-workers on the same side of the same case equals a conflict of interest or fraud would motivate only the most desperate and starving attorney to take that case. Any lawyer with a good practice would turn it down cold.

The next bit of MSM malfeasance concerns Nathan Wade’s pay. Both the WaPo and the NYT stories report that Wade and his firm received over $650,000 for work on the case. To the average minimum-wage worker, paying one’s lover that amount of money sounds bad, real bad, doesn’t it?

But the NYT story neglects to report Wade’s hourly rate, which the main WaPo story recites. It’s $250.

Why is that significant? Because $250 per hour is a pedestrian rate—even a low rate—for high-stakes lawyers of some experience. (In comparison, top lawyers working on the FTX cryptocurrency bankruptcy earn between $1,000 and $2,000 per hour.) And if you divide the $650,000 by that rate, you get 2600 hours.

Now one reason why lawyers have money is that most of them work hard. For every lawyer I knew (and I practiced for eight years and consulted for another 25), forty hours a week was a bare minimum, seldom achieved in practice. The typical lawyer’s week is more like 50-60 hours, with bursts of 80-100, for example, near trials. So if Wade did a typical 52 hour week, on average for single year of 50 weeks, with two weeks off for vacation, his gross pay would amount to that “horrible” $650,000, with no tricks, conflicts or fraud.

Any BTW, the WaPo piece reports, albeit much later, that Wade and his firm were paid “more than $650,000 over two years to lead a criminal investigation typically managed by civil servants.” (emphases added). It also reports that the two other prosecutors whom Willis hired, both of whom are white, and who are not even suspected of being her lovers, were paid at exactly the same rate. Not much to see here, is there, when the facts are presented in logical order?

The nub of the matter is yellow journalism, even at the WaPo which had, in my view, the most comprehensive summary of the relevant facts. The end of the first section of its article reports that the claims of conflict of interest and fraud were made by a lawyer for one Mike Roman, a Trump co-defendant in the case, and that, “Other co-defendants, including Trump, are weighing whether to sign on to the pleading.”

In other words, the claims were just that, bare claims of a single defendant, which Trump and his team hadn’t even reviewed. Yet the WaPo’s language (quoted in my second paragraph above) makes it seem as if the reporter and/or the WaPo editorial board, or at least some competent staff lawyer, had reviewed these claims and found them credible. Thus the WaPo served as a (perhaps inadvertent) megaphone, letting an obscure lawyer for an obscure Trump co-defendant stir up mud with garbage claims.

This is bald yellow journalism—sensationalism near the lead! In the interests of selling “news” and baiting clicks, the reporter gave the apparent approval of an exemplar of the MSM—the same venerable WaPo that, in another guise, had broken the Watergate story and brought down a president (Nixon)—to the most tenuous and unlikely of legal theories.

To me, the intent of these tenuous claims is obvious. They are hardly designed to make any headway in the legal case against Trump and his co-defendants. They would be subjects for outright dismissal in court, if not for sanctions for frivolous filings. Rather, they are designed to rile up the public, especially the MAGA “base.”

Claims that DA Willis paid her alleged lover a small fortune to prosecute their cult leader, and that he “kicked back” some of that money to her for romantic travel, seem designed for a single purpose only. They might get voters without legal knowledge to suspend all reason and conclude that the prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election was and is a “witch hunt” after all.

So I believe the target of these claims is not the judge or the legal system, but the Trump-susceptible voting public. If Georgia has an analogue to federal Rule 11—which imposes monetary penalties for filing frivolous claims in federal court—I hope and trust that Willis and her team will assert it against the attorney (and the client) who pushed this misuse of court time on nonsense.

As for Wade, the only credible claim against him that I saw in the whole, long and sordid WaPo story was for allegedly turning off the recorder and trying to intimidate a witness with unrecorded threats. If true, this behavior might result in: (1) exclusion of that witness’ possibly coerced testimony at trial and/or (2) a judicial admonition or even sanction against Wade himself. The notion that it would cause, let alone force, the judge to throw out the whole case, let alone long before trial, is the kind of fantasy that no one who had attended a decent law school would seriously entertain.

The cases against Trump and his co-defendants will be decided based on evidence adduced at trial. Every bit of evidence, or the person who introduces it, will be subject to examination and cross-examination by skilled advocates. The motivations of the advocates are simply irrelevant, and the courtroom procedures—developed over centuries for precisely that purpose—make them so.

In our legal system, what motivates prosecutors (or any other lawyers) doesn’t matter. They could hate the defendant personally, love each other, or just be doing their jobs. What matters is how the jury views the evidence, under the judge’s watchful eye. The judge makes sure the evidence satisfies the rules (also developed over centuries) and is not unduly prejudicial to one party or another.

Defendants’ attempts to bring the prosecutors’ personal motivations into the courtroom is nothing less than a frontal assault on the way our courts work, developed over the 809 years since Magna Carta. No Anglo-American court will or should approve that assault.

Like the whole thrust of the complaint against the two alleged lovers, this media hit has little or nothing to do with the law. It’s par for the course for Trump and his team. It’s a cry to the public: “See, my persecutors (sic) have feet of clay. They do bad things, too. Therefore, I am innocent.”

That’s a nonsequitur of truly Trumpian proportions, and one which no judge or decent newspaper should ever entertain. These days, when Trump and his team have long histories of pandering to emotion and the general public’s ignorance and base instincts, our newspapers have got to do more. They have a sacred obligation to support Reason, one of the foundations of the Western Enlightenment and our legal system, which now, with Trump apparently ascendant, may be on the ropes.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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