This Fani Willis thing isn’t going anywhere

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In politics, or in any adversarial scenario, there’s a natural tendency to assume that if the other side makes an oddly specific move, they must know what they’re doing. Even if you know for certain that the people making the move are idiots, and even if you can logically see that the move has no chance of working, there’s still that paradoxical tendency to think that they wouldn’t be making such a move unless they knew something.

This brings us to the alleged Fani Willis “scandal.” Yesterday even more defendants joined a motion to get Willis removed from the case for allegedly having an affair with someone else working on the case. It’s just so intuitively obvious why this isn’t going anywhere. There’s just no scenario where Point A is a prosecutor having an affair and Point B is the defendants being magically off the hook.

But there’s still the nagging question of why so many Fulton County defendants are getting on board with this court filing. If they’re all giving it a try, then there must be something to it, right? They must somehow know that it has a chance to work. Well, in a word, no.

You have to put this in the proper context. These defendants all have an overwhelming criminal case against them, including several former defendants who are now witnesses for the prosecution. These remaining defendants have almost zero chance of getting off the hook. They’re all headed for prison. They have no hope, and they have nothing to lose. So why wouldn’t they sign on to a last ditch motion to try to get the prosecutor removed? Sure, it has no chance of working. But there’s nothing else left for them to try.

So no, these defendants don’t know anything that we don’t, and this filing to remove Fani Willis isn’t going anywhere. It won’t get the charges thrown out. It won’t create the basis for an appeal. It won’t delay things. It won’t do anything. And if any of these defendants are thinking logically, they know it. But they’ve got nothing else left to try. It’s simply one of these things that’ll get a lot of attention and hype, and then it’ll end up having been nothing all along.

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