Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at the media’s attempts to run cover for Fani Willis, cast doubt on an incredulous tale of fraud in the Cut, and cover more media misses.
Media Not Ready to Accept Fani Willis Did Anything Wrong
Let she who has not hired her boyfriend to prosecute a former president on the taxpayer dime cast the first stone. Or at least that’s the message the mainstream media seem to be conveying with recent coverage of Fani Willis, which paints the district attorney’s alleged behavior as something any one of us could have done and dismisses criticism by suggesting she’s being held to a higher standard because she is black.
A defense lawyer for one of Trump’s co-defendants in the Georgia election-interference case has accused Willis of hiring her boyfriend, Nathan J. Wade, to lead the prosecution as a “form of self-dealing” that gives the DA an incentive to keep the case going. Wade has earned more than $650,000 in taxpayer funds since 2021 — and has spent money on joint vacations he has taken with Willis.
The unfolding scandal came to a head last week when Willis testified at an evidentiary hearing about whether she should be disqualified over her relationship with Wade. Willis, for her part, was defiant on the stand and has claimed she and Wade “have been professional associates and friends since 2019,” but there “was no personal relationship” between the pair in November 2021, when she appointed Wade to the case. She claims their relationship began after he was hired.
But former Fulton County DA employee Robin Yeartie, who described herself as a “good friend” of Willis, said last week she has “no doubt” Willis and Wade were romantically involved beginning in 2019 up until she and Willis last spoke in 2022.
Willis spent much of her time on the stand giving bizarre, rambling answers to direct questions about her relationship with Wade, waxing philosophical about romance, personal finance and even her preferred cocktail. (It’s Gray Goose vodka).
Much like the scene that played out with then–Harvard president Claudine Gay weeks ago, Willis’s defenders are crying racism and sexism against those who would try to question Willis’s alleged misdeeds.
The New York Times lets readers know “Why the Case Against Fani Willis Feels Familiar to Black Women,” while the Associated Press helpfully explains how Willis’s testimony “evokes long-standing frustrations for Black women leaders.”
“Interviews with a dozen Black women at varying stages of their careers found them to be painfully conflicted about Ms. Willis’s situation and her treatment in the public eye,” the Times reports. “To many, there is something galling about watching Mr. Trump and his allies attack Ms. Willis over a consensual romantic relationship when he has faced accusations of sexual misconduct and assault.”
“Some lamented Ms. Willis’s conduct as a mistake, but not one that should remove her from the case against Mr. Trump. Others, thinking about their own experiences in the workplace, suggested another concern: They feel that Black women are held to a different standard and that Ms. Willis should have known that her identity, along with the enormous political stakes of the case, would create a white-hot spotlight on her personal conduct,” it adds.
A family-litigation attorney tells the AP it is “no secret that the common sentiment among Black women in positions of power (is that they) must over-perform to be seen as equals to their counterparts.”
“Here, Ms. Willis is being scrutinized for things that are not directly related to her job performance, in ways we see other Black women regularly picked apart,” Jessica T. Ornsby told the outlet.
On MSNBC, legal correspondent Lisa Rubin claimed Willis “crushed” her testimony, which she claimed was “successful” and “effective.”
“I think Fani Willis gave us a picture of who she is, a person who is very proudly independent,” Rubin said. “Nathan Wade had set the stage for that. But somehow from her own mouth, describing how she was raised, why she kept cash in her house to the dissolution of her relationship which basically ended, according to her, because they had different attitudes about men and women and their roles in the world. All of that, I thought, increased her credibility.”
(Meanwhile, George Washington Law School professor Jonathan Turley said Willis was “out-trumping Trump,” with her testimony after having “attacked counsel, attacked the motivations of the proceedings, and called people liars.” Former Obama-appointed U.S. attorney Michael Moore called the testimony a “train wreck” and said it was “”just was not credible.”)
And in a move that will surprise no one, the co-hosts of The View offered their own defense of the Georgia DA.
Joy Behar questioned whether the two lawyers who questioned Willis have a conflict of interest because they are married to each other. But Sunny Hostin jumped in to note “Georgia has a law in place that it is not unethical or illegal to have a romantic relationship with co-counsel. Even opposing counsel.”
Still, Hostin went on to say the situation with Willis and Wade is “just a political move” so that Trump “can push this and try to kick this case and this can down the road.”
Ana Navarro suggested Willis is facing a “double standard” as a woman of color but did say the relationship does not look good for Willis and that she should have disclosed it.
Liberal late-night host Stephen Colbert dramatically implied Willis was risking democracy with her personal relationship with Wade.
“Here’s the thing: Yes, Donald Trump and his associates are on trial in this, one of the most important cases in the history of our republic,” he said. “So, and I’ve just got one follow-up question here: Given that if you’re removed from the prosecution, it could delay this trial until after the election, how good was the sex? Good enough to risk democracy over? Because I’ve never had sex that good. You know what really feels good? Donald Trump going to prison.”
It makes sense that the media would have a hard time accepting Willis may have erred; it lauded her as a new “it” girl when she took up the case.
In February 2021, the Associated Press called Willis “a skilled litigator who isn’t afraid of tough cases.” Months later, a Time magazine article said Willis is “one of those boss ladies who is small in stature but big in presence, a commander armed with high standards, an easy laugh and a knack for sustained eye contact.”
MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell celebrated the idea of “strong black women standing up to Donald Trump,” while Rachel Maddow said Willis “blew me away” in an interview.
Lawrence O’Donnell said, “Fani Willis is on the threshold of becoming the most famous district attorney in American history, period, done.”
Headline Fail of the Week
A personal-finance columnist for the Cut, a New York magazine subsidiary, wrote a personal essay this week unveiling a secret that many would have taken to the grave: “The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger: I never thought I was the kind of person to fall for a scam.”
Charlotte Cowles writes of a day in October in which she fell for a scam call from someone pretending to be from Amazon that ended with her believing she needed to hand over her life’s savings to the “CIA.”
NR’s Charles C.W. Cooke says Cowles seemingly fell for “one of the most far-fetched and obvious con-jobs I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.”
“It is possible — likely, in fact — that the ultimate answer to all of these questions is that Cowles is profoundly stupid. Or, to invert Cowles’s own words: It is possible that she got scammed because she is, in fact, ‘hysterical, or a rube.’ If so, she has no business being a financial-advice columnist, whose sole professional role is to advise others about money. And if not? Well, then she’s giving Jussie Smollett a run for his money,” he writes.
Media Misses
• This Pro-Publica post is beyond parody:
• Puck News reported that many in the White House press corps have “spent the last couple years noticeably avoiding the topic of the president’s agility and acuity because it felt indelicate or irrelevant.” But now, special counsel Robert Hur’s concerning claims about Biden’s memory has “stirred some soul-searching.”
• CNN recently promoted Natasha Bertrand to cover national security and politics – despite Bertrand having spread the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation ahead of the 2020 election and having bought into the Russian-collusion hoax.
• Tucker Carlson’s pro-Russia rhetoric does have some limitations, apparently.