Fani Willis ‘Showed Her Hand’ This Week On Looming Trump Indictment in Georgia, Says Benjamin Wittes

Benjamin Wittes, legal expert and editor of LawFare, joined Charlie Sykes on the Bulwark Podcast on Thursday to discuss all the various legal trouble facing former President Donald Trump.

Wittes and Sykes went case by case and eventually landed on Fani Willis, the Fulton County DA, who convened a special grand jury to look into allegations Trump attempted to influence Georgia election officials in 2020. She is also investigating the so-called fake-electors scheme to overturn the result of the presidential election in the state, which was pushed by Trump allies.

Wittes argued that Willis, who had said in January that a charging decision was “imminent” in the Trump case, “showed her hand” this week in a letter that he argued did not receive nearly enough attention in the media.

Wittes offered three possible reasons for the charging delay. Arguing first that there may be no actual delay, “She’s working on implementing it, and that just takes some time.”

“Here’s some other things we know. We know that just as the special grand jury was finishing its work in December, the January 6th committee dumped 250 depositions into the public domain. And that came too late for the special grand jury to consider any of it,” Wittes continued, adding:

But if you’re the prosecutors who are then going to bring cases based on the special grand jury work, you undoubtedly have a due diligence obligation to go through all of those 250, at least the ones that could be relevant to your case with care and make sure that the testimony is consistent with the testimony many of those same witnesses gave to you, or that there isn’t material that contradicts or that there isn’t material that requires that you then go interview further people.

So a second possibility is that the January 6th committee threw a bit of a wrench into their spokes just with the way it wrapped up its business.

And then a third factor, which has spilled out into the public a little bit is that there are clearly negotiations between Fani Willis and some of the Georgia fake electors over immunity deals.

And these discussions have been complicated by the fact that a whole bunch of potential defendants in these cases are represented by the same lawyers who are, you know, closely aligned with Donald Trump. It’s a very similar situation as developed with Cassidy Hutchison in the January 6th Committee matter.

And Fani Willis recently went into court and sought to disqualify one of those lawyers on grounds of conflict of interest because the lawyer was representing multiple people whose interests were not necessarily aligned. And so one possibility as well is that it’s been delayed by the fact that, you know, she thinks that there are people who might want to offer information in exchange for immunity who are not in a position to do so because of who their lawyers are. And so resolving that may be a time commitment.

“I do think, however, that Fani Willis, in a way that didn’t get enough attention this week kind of showed her hand, which is to say she wrote a letter to the court asking for a whole bunch of protective resources around the court, around her office, in the context of indictments that were going to come over the summer,” Wittes added.

“And that is undoubtedly a reference to, the letter was in the context of this case. And so it’s not subtle what she’s talking about. She’s gearing up for a New York-like case and needs a degree of police presence that that court has never had to deal with,” he added, referencing the protests outside the Lower Manhattan court where Trump was arraigned in early April.

“So I think she’s basically said that sometime between in July or August, she’s going to bring the case against Donald Trump. She hasn’t said that explicitly. But I, I cannot understand another way to read what she has said,” Wittes concluded.

Listen to the clip above or the full podcast here.

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