Re: Follow the Cash: Did Willis Admit to Campaign Finance Violations? Plus: Fani Won't Testify

[But Trump...]

On 15 Mar 2022, Rudy Canoza <notg...@gmail.com> posted some
news:0a4YJ.82408$Mpg8....@fx34.iad:

> This corrupt black cunt really thought she was immune to scrutiny.

The Greatest Show on Earth returns today in Fulton County, Georgia, but
it's tough to see how it could possibly top its opening day. Fani Willis
was supposed to return to the witness stand today to continue her
testimony in the motion to disqualify her and her former boyfriend Nathan
Wade from the RICO case against Donald Trump et al. But someone in the
Fulton County DA's office just called an audible:

Fulton County prosecutors will not call District Attorney Fani Willis to
the witness stand for additional questioning Friday, after she forcefully
defended herself and accused defense attorneys of lying as part of a bid
to disqualify her and her office from prosecuting the Georgia election
interference case against former President Donald Trump. ...

Prosecutors in her office still plan to call at least three witnesses to
answer questions Friday, including her father.

Today was supposed to provide Willis her turn to explain herself. Instead,
it may be that her team decided that putting her on the stand was a
disaster that needed to be stopped regardless of the potential benefits.
That's a case of closing the barn door after the horse has already bolted.
And did it ever.

The theory behind the DQ motion is that Willis appointed Wade and paid
exorbitant fees in order to personally benefit from the funds in the form
of gifts and travel. Willis and Wade both admitted that they did not
disclose the relationship as required by regulations, and Willis conceded
yesterday that she violated the prohibition on receiving gifts as a public
official over a cumulative amount of $100.

Willis had an explanation for the allegation, however. She testified that
she keeps large sums of cash at her house at all times, and that she
reimbursed Wade as they went along on the trips from that stash. Defense
attorney Ashleigh Merchant pressed her on whether she had bank records for
withdrawals for the case, but Willis insisted that the cash didn't come to
her through banks.

Instead, she explained, she kept thousands of dollars from contributions
to one of her electoral campaigns -- seemingly an admission of an entirely
new reason to disqualify Willis:


Fani Willis Admits That She 'Kept' Cash From A Previous Political Campaign


Willis told Ashleigh Merchant, an attorney working on behalf of GOP
political operative Mike Roman, that it is her standard practice to keep
cash on hand.

“But I always have cash at the house. That has been, I don’t know, all my
life. If you’re a woman and you go on a date with a man, you better have
$200 in your pocket so if that man acts up, you can go where you want to
go. So I keep cash in my house,” Willis said.

“So my question was, where did that cash originally come from? If it came
out of the bank?” Merchant then asked.

“Cash is fungible. I’ve had cash for years in my house. So for me to tell
you the source of where it comes from, when you go to Publix and you buy
something, you get $50, you throw it in there. It’s been my whole life,”
Willis replied. “When I took out a large amount of money on my first
campaign, I kept some of the cash of that. Like, to tell you I just have
cash in my house, I don’t have as much today as I would normally have, but
I’m building back up now.”

This was hardly the only problem that Willis created for herself in
yesterday's testimony. Those began when she stormed into the courtroom and
abruptly reversed her objection to a subpoena to testify after Nathan
Wade's embarrassing testimony. Willis insisted she didn't watch any of it,
but began accusing everyone in the courtroom of lying and disrupting the
proceedings with emotional filibusters about her experiences as a black
woman.

This admission of conversion of campaign funds, especially in cash, could
land her in legal trouble of another kind. First off, most states forbid
such personal conversions of campaign funds to anything other than another
campaign. Does Georgia allow candidates to simply take the cash home and
use it for personal purchases? I doubt it, but we may soon find out.

Second problem: Even if Georgia law allows such personal conversions of
campaign cash to personal use, it raises an issue about Willis' income tax
status. That cash would have to be reported to the IRS and Georgia's
revenue office as income. Did Willis report that cash and pay taxes on it?
Maybe, but we also heard about a tax lien on Willis' property that
remained unresolved during the period that Willis claimed to be
reimbursing Wade through her cash stash (or "hoard," as one of the other
defense attorneys put it).

Something tells me this won't be the last day that Willis finds herself on
the stand in a courtroom.

Ironically, though, the cash explanation might just work, former
prosecutor Philip Holloway writes in a Fox News column today. As
embarrassing as it may be, Judge Scott McAfee may have no other choice but
to accept that explanation, absent any evidence to the contrary. But
that's not the end of this matter either, Holloway warns:

But the biggest embarrassment for Fani Willis is the cash. The big issue
that the defense needed to prove is that Willis was personally enriched
financially by virtue of Wade having paid for luxury travel including
Caribbean cruises and trips to Napa wine country.

And here is the big embarrassment: Willis and Wade testified in lockstep
with each other that Willis reimbursed her lover in cash. Untraceable,
undocumented cold hard cash.

Fani Willis is either a terrible witness or a brilliant witness, depending
on how you see things. But she is likely to nevertheless prevail on this
issue. Why? Because the judge may be stuck with her claim she repaid Wade
in cash.

Willis and Wade are not out of the woods yet, however. There are still the
issues of whether either or both have lied to the court about when their
affair began and whether there has been other prosecutorial misconduct by
virtue of a multitude of extrajudicial public comments that allegedly were
made to deny a fair trial to the defendants.

It would be ironic to let Willis off the hook for passing cash around in
manners more commonly seen in RICO cases ... just so that she can
prosecute a RICO case that doesn't actually allege any financial benefit
to the conspiracy. As for Holloway's final point, Willis' black-woman
defense to all allegations yesterday may go a very long way in proving
just how much Willis wants to poison the jury pool on the basis of race.

Will today's testimony from the DA's office match the fireworks of
yesterday? We'll see, but let's keep popping the popcorn and see if
Willis' team learned anything about the First Rule of Holes from her first
day on the stand. It seems that Willis herself finally may have.

https://hotair.com/ed-morrissey/2024/02/16/irony-alert-did-fani-willis-
admit-to-campaign-finance-violations-n3783053