The one detail that says Fani Willis is going to be able to take down all nineteen of her criminal defendants
Fulton County DA Fani Willis criminally indicted nineteen people in her 2020 election probe, ranging from a former President of the United States, to the guy who used to be known as America’s Mayor, to a former to Department of Justice official, all the way down to a number of local nobodies. It’s an overwhelmingly comprehensive criminal case. But Willis also came short of what she could have tried to do – and that’s why I’m so confident she’s going to win.
For instance, Willis poked hard at Lindsey Graham, but she didn’t end up indicting him. Maybe he cut a cooperation deal that we don’t yet know about. Or maybe Willis simply looked at how the Speech and Debate Clause would give Graham a partial defense at trial, and concluded that she wasn’t going to be able to get a conviction against him. We also don’t yet know why Willis poked hard at people like Michael Flynn but ultimately didn’t indict them. But the point is that Willis didn’t simply indict every single person on her dance card. She made strategic choices about who to indict and who not to indict, based on what the evidence and the law ultimately said.
I’m fond of saying that in these kinds of matters, the most “aggressive” move is often the wrong one, and often produces the least effective results. Instead you have to root for the most strategically successful moves, whether they make your socks roll up and down in the moment or not. It would have been a lot of fun to see Lindsey Graham indicted yesterday. But she’d have been making a mistake by indicting him if she was just expecting him to be acquitted anyway.
This is why I think Fani Willis has got this. It’s why I expect her to end up getting convictions or guilty pleas from everyone she indicted yesterday. She could probably have indicted thirty or forty people and made this an even more “aggressive” case. Instead she looked at the law and the evidence, identified the nineteen people she could actually get a conviction against, and indicted those nineteen people. If she’s being that judicious in bringing charges, then the charges she has brought are all likely near-100% locks for conviction.
Moreover, because Willis only indicted these nineteen specific people out of a much larger group of potential targets, the people who did get indicted are probably going to figure out pretty quickly that Willis does indeed have them nailed. It’s going to prompt some of them to flip sooner rather than later, particularly given the kind of leniency that tends to be available to the first couple people who flip in a nineteen-person criminal plot.
Everything about these indictments says that Fani Willis knows what she’s doing. Everyone not named “Trump” would be wise to get in there and cut a cooperating plea deal while the getting is still good. All eighteen of them can still get some kind of leniency for giving up Trump. Then there’s Trump himself, who doesn’t have a bigger fish to flip on, and is simply screwed.
Now that we’re getting into RICO charges, there’s a lot of talk about “Teflon Don.” But it’s important to remember that the original Teflon Don, mob boss John Gotti, spent the rest of his life in prison after some of his underlings flipped on him and testified against him at trial. Donald Trump is awaiting the same fate. It’s how the game is played. And Fani Willis is showing that she knows how to win it.
