Georgia prosecutor Nathan Wade’s closed-door House testimony is likely to come to nothing much of note.

H ere I thought we were done with my four-year series, Misadventures in Lawfare, at least until after the election.

After all, Jack Smith is stuck in the mud, his book-length description of former President Trump’s J6 infamia having enraged only the already-enraged, and his Mar-a-Lago documents prosecution in appellate suspension. Alvin Bragg’s case was such a joke that Democrats tend to restrict their “convicted felon” Trump banter to conversations among themselves, lest they remind the country of the underlying travesty — and Bragg couldn’t even get Trump formally convicted and sentenced owing to his own malpractice in ignoring the immunity issue. (Trump’s lawyers filed a brief in the Second Circuit on Monday, trying yet again to get Bragg’s case removed to federal court.) On the civil side, a New York appellate court seems poised at least to gut, if not to toss entirely, the half-billion-dollar damages award imposed by Arthur Engoron, an elected club Democrat in a robe, in Trump-deranged AG Tish James’s fraud case with no fraud victims.

Alas, still stirring is what remains — despite the stiff competition — the most cartoonish of all the lawfare follies: the “RICO prosecution” brought against Cosa Trumpstra by Fulton County, Ga., district attorney Fani Willis and her love-struck lead prosecutor, Nathan Wade.

This, for once, is not Willis’s doing — at least not directly. Sensing that lawfare has shifted in the 2024 campaign stretch run from the Democrats’ master plan against Trump to a Democratic abuse-of-power liability, Trump’s House GOP Myrmidons, led by Ohio’s Jim Jordan, the Judiciary Committee chairman, have had the U.S. marshals hunt Wade down. For a time, he seemed to be ducking their subpoena after efforts to have him submit to a voluntary interview failed. But he has been served and, today, is due to be grilled behind closed doors.

Wade, of course, was disqualified from further participation in the case when his romantic affair with Willis came to light — a conflict-of-interest issue fraught with potential financial self-dealing because Willis and Wade allegedly took luxury vacations while she was paying him an unusually high taxpayer-funded salary. Judge Scott McAfee’s disqualification order was appropriate but incoherent: It made no sense to permit Willis’s continued oversight of the prosecution while bouncing Wade — they are a package deal, as it were. (At the time, both Judge McAfee and Willis were facing county election challenges to be decided by voters in the Atlanta area, the hub of Willis’s political base. They both won.) On the other hand, as I recounted at the time, McAfee’s order was scathing about the lawyers in love, noting the “odor of mendacity” wafting through his courtroom after their testimony about the timing and circumstances of their affair.

This, naturally, is what Jordan wants to explore. It is of a kind, then, with the theater we observed in spring 2023, when the chairman cited some comparatively modest amount of federal funding that Bragg’s office receives as his committee’s pretext for investigating the Manhattan DA’s afore-described prosecution of Trump — and, in particular, issuing a subpoena for former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz (author of People v. Donald Trump — An Inside Account) in an effort to publicize what pro-Trump Republicans rightly regarded as a politicized investigation that had divided prosecutors in the office.

As I pointed out at the time (see here and here), the problem with this sort of probe is that the U.S. Congress has no oversight authority over state prosecutors’ offices — it has no business probing their internal workings and exercises of prosecutorial discretion, although it is legitimate to investigate how they spend federal money and whether they are violating federal law. At the same time, a state district attorney has no business telling Congress what it can and can’t investigate — even though the DA would be within his or her rights to refuse to provide information about sovereign state law-enforcement activities and decisions.

Add to the mix that courts generally do not want to wade into political disputes between Congress and state agencies, just as judges prefer to avoid squabbles between Congress and the federal executive branch. The preferred practice is for the two sides to negotiate and cooperate; that way, Congress can get whatever information it is entitled to and the state can protect its interests, with a minimum of high dudgeon, threats to cut off funding, and allegations that each side is obstructing the other’s investigation.

And then there’s the theater: Jordan and committee Republicans did not really care about how Bragg was using federal funding; they were trying to help Trump. And Bragg was not defending state sovereignty; he was trying to conceal the patent political objectives of his Trump investigation.

In the end, after lots of noise and trips to federal district and appellate courts, the House got its interviews and Bragg’s prosecutors refused to discuss the internal deliberations of their Trump investigation. Yawn.

The Wade subpoena is just a Georgia replay of this dynamic. The Fulton County prosecution is a complete fiasco. Far from a racketeering case, it is an even more overt attempt to criminalize presidential acts than Smith’s J6 indictment — which is still in suspended animation precisely because such acts are at least presumptively immune from prosecution (and some of them conclusively so). The disqualification litigation is simply yet another window into how totally out of her depth Willis was in bringing such a case — the RICO indictment is the prosecutorial fever-dream version of the unabashedly partisan House January 6 Committee investigation. And Wade has been in hiding and has now been directed by Willis to withhold information — ostensibly to protect state privileges, but in reality because her and Wade’s state-court testimony about their relationship was laugh-out-loud incredible.

So again, Jordan doesn’t really want to explore how the Fulton County DA’s office is administered; he is trying to help Trump make lawfare points in the campaign. And Willis is not actually protecting the sovereign integrity of her moribund prosecution; she’s trying to protect herself and Wade from further humiliation and potential prosecution.

I would expect that Wade will reluctantly show up on Capitol Hill, try to claim state privilege, and, as in the state-court disqualification hearing, have a bout of amnesia regarding whatever questions he does answer.

Another misadventure in lawfare.