I’ve always liked those criminal mastermind movies.
There’s always a criminal genius who assembles a crew of the best in their fields to pull off the heist of the century. After a flawlessly executed crime -– with lots of plot twists -– the crew makes a clean getaway and meets at a secret location to divvy up the haul. Just before they go their separate ways, the boss always admonishes his coconspirators to:
- Don’t do anything stupid
- Don’t attract attention, and
- Don’t spend any of the loot until the dust settles
But in real life there’s always one stooge who buys a Ferrari, puts a kilo of blow in the trunk, and drives 80 mph through a school zone in front of the lead FBI agent’s house. Criminal conspiracies always unravel because one knucklehead can’t avoid being foolish.
Well, I’m running out of popcorn watching Atlanta’s version of the criminal comedy genre.
According to Breitbart News, Jeff DiSantis may be the mastermind of the Atlanta chapter of the “get Joe Biden re-elected at all costs” caper. He’s a longtime Democrat party operative, conveniently placed in the Fulton County DA’s office, in time to run the Trump RICO case -– behind the scenes of course. The county’s district attorney, Fani Willis, is providing an Academy Award-worthy performance as the stooge which the mastermind wishes he hadn’t recruited. But per President “Return to Normalcy’s” orders, he needed a diversity hire with prosecutorial authority, negotiable ethical standards, and enough ego to be the public face of the conspiracy. As a comedy, the plot also called for someone with insufficient mental acuity to play her part smartly. Fani was the logical choice.
Our master-criminal coconspirators came up with a plan to return someone who is otherwise unelectable, Joe Biden, to the Oval Office. They’d use a novel application of the law, to indict Trump and 18 others for doing absolutely nothing illegal. Their plan was quite clever: prosecute Trump and his pals in a friendly venue, and then see if the Donald can campaign from a cell as well as Joe can campaign from a basement.
I suspect the indictment was followed by the standard crew admonishment: Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t attract attention. Don’t spend the spoils until the dust settles. But then the crew’s stooge did what stooges do. She acted like an overconfident fool with no self-discipline.
The public face of the conspiracy decided to have an affair with a man (Nathan Wade) going through an ugly divorce. Then she hired him as an overpaid member of the crew – making his estranged wife a material witness to the conspiracy. But she didn’t stop there. She also paid him almost three-quarters of a million bucks – of taxpayer money – and helped him spend the loot on expensive vacations. That exposed the “get Trump” conspiracy to state and local oversight.
Once Fani’s indiscretions exposed the criminal conspiracy (hers, not Trump’s), the RICO defense attorneys asked that she and her boytoy be disqualified from the case due to conflict of interest. Apparently, Georgia frowns on making money on the side for trying to put people in jail.
The request to have Fani disqualified from the Trump case caused all hell to break loose. First, she decided to engage in a bit of jury tampering. She mounted the pulpit of an Atlanta church and told future members of the jury pool that the RICO defendants were racists. Next, when the judge called a hearing to consider the disqualification request, she volunteered to testify and proceeded to:
- Throw a temper tantrum – calling the opposing counsel liars
- Announce that she had mad stacks of cash at home, which she had extorted from her campaign
- Claim that prior testimony from her friend was a lie because her affair with Wade hadn’t begun until after she had hired him -– making her only guilty of sexual harassment, and
- Stating that Wade had never spent the night at her place, because she’s a woman of virtue and purity
In short, Fani took the stand, defiantly denied the allegations, and dared the opposing counsel to rebut her -– so they did. The defense counsel subpoenaed and analyzed Nathan Wade’s cell phone records. They discovered that in the year prior to when Fani and Nathan had supposedly become romantically involved, they had exchanged over 2,000 phone calls and almost 12,000 text messages. On at least two occasions, Wade’s call and geo-tracking data fit a “booty call” pattern.
- A late evening call to Fani;
- Was followed by Wade’s phone traveling from the vicinity of his home to the vicinity of Willis’ home;
- Where it stayed for several hours;
- Then returned to the vicinity of Wade’s home;
- Wrapping up the evening activities with a final text message to Fani at or around 4:00 a.m.
This mounting evidence of unethical (and maybe illegal) behavior is forcing Judge Scott McAfee’s hand. He has waived the attorney-client privilege for Nathan Wade’s divorce attorney, Terrence Bradley, and has ordered him to testify about his knowledge of the Willis and Wade extracurricular activities.
Our comedy down in Atlanta isn’t rolling the credits yet, but we can already see that Fani is masterfully playing the stooge. Just look as how she’s doing with the post-heist admonishment.
- Don’t do anything stupid – like exposing the conspiracy to a divorce proceeding.
- Don’t attract attention – like publicly calling criminal defendants racists.
- Don’t spend the spoils – like by extorting money from the county, laundering it through a boyfriend, and using it for vacations to Napa Valley, Caribbean islands, Miami, and Aruba.
It’s all been great for the popcorn industry. I wonder if Paul Pelosi bought stock in Orville Redenbacher’s.