In Georgia, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis reportedly is putting the finishing touches on her grand jury, in preparation of an ambitious indictment of former President Donald Trump.
Another week, another indictment of Donald Trump.
In Georgia, Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis reportedly is putting the finishing touches on her grand jury, in preparation of an ambitious indictment of the former president and perhaps over a dozen of his 2020 campaign advisers and operatives.
The imminent charges relate to Trump’s efforts to undo the Peach State’s popular election, which was narrowly won by now-President Joe Biden.
Like Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, Willis is an elected Democrat.
In Atlanta as in the Big Apple, employing the criminal justice system against the Democrats’ arch nemesis makes for good progressive politics, even if it may be dodgy law.
That is not to say that Willis’s case will necessarily prove as dodgy as Bragg’s appears to be.
In the Soviet tradition of Lavrentiy Beria, Bragg started out with a man he was targeting then scoured the penal statutes to find a crime to pin on him.
The result is an embarrassing effort to convert a bookkeeping irregularity that harmed no one and that may not even have been a misdemeanor into 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
In theory, Trump could be sentenced to over a century’s imprisonment — in a case brought by a paradigm progressive prosecutor whose default position is to refrain from prosecuting more serious crimes that plague New Yorkers.
Willis, by contrast, is probing serious misconduct — the duplicitous and heavy-handed schemes by which Trump tried to remain in power despite losing the election.
She can plausibly maintain that she is investigating Trump based on what he did, not who he is.
The question is whether what he did amounts to criminal offenses.
