A liberal heroine was born on Thursday afternoon when Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney overseeing the Georgia election case against Donald Trump and 18 co-conspirators, took the witness stand to star in a highly unusual spectacle.
In November 2021, Willis hired Nathan Wade, a private attorney, to help her office conduct the investigation into Trump & Co.’s conduct.
It was an unusual choice; CNN legal analyst Elie Honig has observed that Wade, who has specialized mostly in personal-injury and family law, was “conspicuously underqualified” for the role.
“He has never — repeat, never — tried a single felony criminal case. Yet Willis selected him to lead the most complex and important racketeering case in Georgia history?” marveled Honig, presumably with a single eyebrow raised.
In recent days, it’s come to light that Willis and Wade had an undisclosed romantic relationship during which they enjoyed trips to Napa, Aruba, the Bahamas and Belize.
Both lawyers claim that Wade, who has been paid over $650,000 by Willis’ office for his work on the election case, was reimbursed by Willis for what he spent on the trips.
Naturally, those reimbursements came in the form of cold, hard, untraceable, unfalsifiable cash.
Willis and Wade also both say that their relationship began after the latter was awarded the lucrative contract.
Unfortunately for the former couple, who say they broke up in 2023, a friend of Willis has offered sworn testimony alleging that their relationship actually began in 2019.
That would go a long way toward explaining why the district attorney picked a neophyte to help her tackle one of the most consequential criminal cases in human history.
On the stand, Willis was nothing if not entertaining.
She eagerly explained that while her ex enjoys a good bottle of wine, she prefers Grey Goose vodka.
After being asked about whether she and Wade spent time together in 2020, she bizarrely insisted that she was “not going to emasculate a black man.”
And in another notable moment, she pretended not to understand a direct question from one defendant’s attorney and was subsequently rebuked by Judge Scott McAfee, who threatened to strike her testimony if she continued to be obstinate.
For this farcical performance, Willis is already being celebrated in the same way that Michael Avenatti once was. You remember Michael Avenatti, the crusading lawyer for Stormy Daniels who was truly, finally going to be the end of Donald Trump.
CNN anchors wondered aloud if he would run for president. Then, of course, it all fell apart, and Avenatti was convicted for defrauding Daniels.
MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin raved that the “proudly independent” Willis “gave us a picture of who she is” and “increased her credibility” by “describing how she was raised” and why she deals in cash.
Her colleague Andrew Weissmann asserted that Willis’ fiery attitude was understandable because she had been “falsely accused,” predicting that McAfee would “cut through” the “salacious material” to rule in Willis and Wade’s favor.
The accused’s niece, #TheResistance hero Mary Trump, submitted that the accusations against Willis “were designed to undermine the authority of a strong black woman who, quite frankly, is running rings around her white, mostly male interlocutors.”
Democratic operative Harry Sisson gushed that Willis’ testimony was “amazing.”
Progressive aggregator MeidasTouch declared that the embattled district attorney had “ended” her critics.
We’re fully through the looking glass here; to have any semblance of perspective and listen to the effusive praise for Willis is to feel like you’ve been transported to the Twilight Zone.
Willis is not some scrappy underdog being unfairly maligned, she’s a prosecutor with the power to strip citizens of their liberty.
She has been entrusted with a solemn responsibility.
Instead of treating it as such, she’s disbursed hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds to her lover.
Now she’s playing the victim for being found out.
If anyone other than Donald Trump — whose conduct in the wake of the 2020 election was abominable, and yes, potentially criminal — were the defendant in this case, the disgust over Willis’ behavior would be universal.
But because she’s after him, Willis has become the subject of admiration rather than scorn on the left.
What a world we live in when even after January 6, Donald Trump is a hero to many on the right, and despite her obvious ethical lapses, Fani Willis is a hero to the left.
We need new heroes. Or maybe none at all.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
