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There were a couple of bits of news on the Trump legal front, both having to do with lawyers. To start, one of the former president's most high-profile counselors, namely Joe Tacopina, will no longer represent Trump. Tacopina formally withdrew yesterday from both the E. Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels cases.
Tacopina did not explain his reasoning, leaving us (and everyone else) to speculate. The obvious guess here is that Trump stopped paying Tacopina's fees, and so Tacopina jumped ship. It could be true; Trump is obviously famous for stiffing his lawyers and Tacopina clearly loves money a whole lot. If this is indeed what happened, one can only wonder what it presages for Trump's many and varied legal cases, if he no longer has the money to afford even semi-competent counsel.
All of this said, Tacopina wasn't doing ALL that much legal work for Trump; he was basically Trump's TV attorney. And while it is true that Tacopina really loves money, he also really loves attention and free PR. We are having at least a little difficulty accepting that he would give up all that TV face time so easily, and so we wonder if there's not something else going on here. Maybe Tacopina told Trump to stop running his mouth about Carroll, and Trump told him to shove it, or something like that.
Moving on, and moving about 870 miles southward, Fulton County DA Fani Willis made a speech in church on Sunday. The speech was 35 minutes long, and was primarily on the subject of her relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade. That seems an odd subject for church, but what do we know? In any event, Willis spent much time talking about how Wade is a close friend, and how she herself is "flawed" and "imperfect." She lamented how upset she has been over claims that she and Wade had/have a sexual relationship. She also suggested that the people who are making hay out of this are motivated by racism and/or sexism.
What Willis did not do is deny the claims being made about her and Wade. That feels an awful lot like confession by omission to us. Assuming it is true, we remain unconvinced it will affect the legal case against Trump and his alleged co-racketeers. After all, the facts are the facts, regardless of how the prosecuting attorney(s) conducted their private lives. Of course, the criticism is going to focus on why she picked an inexperienced outsider to lead the investigation, rather than an experienced prosecutor on her staff. No one begrudges her the boyfriend of her choice, but she shouldn't have hired him to do a job the local staff could do better. If she had been having an affair with Andrew Weissmann, she might have had a case that he was the best prosecutor in the country, but Nathan Wade fails that test.
In any case, politically this is manna from heaven for the MAGA crowd. The amount of spin, insinuation, carping about corruption, etc. will make the Hunter Biden situation look like a walk in the park. (Z)