No matter how the Fani Willis disqualification hearing ultimately plays out, these things are clear: Willis and Nathan Wade, the lawyer Willis hired to handle the election fraud case against Trump and Co. in Georgia, violated age-old rules Black Americans have long tried to observe, which, at their core, hold to this simple premise: do NOT give white folks an opportunity to question your integrity and professionalism.
A modern-day addendum to that rule would add: do NOT give white folks an opportunity to question your integrity and professionalism on international television with the whole world watching.
Trump and his MAGA misfits tried to bluff and bully their way into a second term, ordering Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to undo the electoral ass-whipping he got from Joe Biden.
Willis didn’t just call BS on that bid; she brought the hammer, filing mob-style RICO charges against Trump and his confederates, which would expose them all to long prison sentences if convicted.
She went big game hunting. Apparently, though, she forgot that big game - most especially rich white men in suits - have sharp teeth, claws and horns.
They hire lawyers. They leak to the press. They conflate, and they insinuate.
This ain’t new, and accomplished, grown-ass Black folks like Willis and Wade should know the game.
Except they got caught with their pants down - just about literally.
If Willis is to be believed, she hired Wade, an attorney who is not an experienced criminal prosecutor, BEFORE she began a romantic relationship with him. If Wade is to be believed, his relationship with Willis, started before his marriage to another woman legally ended, wasn’t really an extramarital affair because he considered his marriage to have been “irretrievably broken” back in 2015, when he says his now ex-wife had her own extramarital affair.
Uh-huh. Right.
Why is the timing of this relationship important? Because lawyers for Trump and his pals argue that Wade used public money from the Willis appointment to party up with his paramour, a salacious allegation sure to draw attention away from the criminal conduct laid out in those RICO charges.
They want the judge to disqualify Willis’ office, which would put them one step away from getting the whole case tossed.
Even if those lawyers don’t ultimately succeed, Willis and Wade have failed in a major way. And it’s not just the clutched-pearl concern about their extramarital relationship.
It’s that Willis, in the biggest, most high-profile moment of her career, took a dump at her own dinner table. It’s that Wade did exactly the same.
Both of them did this when they knew - or should have known - that rich, not well-meaning white folks would be combing through their garbage for anything that would foul the case.
They did this when Black people, rightly or wrongly, would be defined by their professionalism in the eyes of many. And they did this when the country at large would be depending on them to bring Trump to justice.
I’m not speaking from some moral mountaintop about the propriety or impropriety of the Willis-Wade relationship. I don’t wear pearls.
But spare me the punditry of this moment as some high-stakes win for them. They should never have been in those witness chairs.
Deep down, below the surface of their anger and combative testimony, they’ve got to know that, too.