February 16, 2024: The Fani Willis Circus

Alexei Navalny dies in prison; Iran’s booming weapons industry; Trump gets trial date, fined $350 million

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The Big Story

Yesterday, we had a short item on yesterday’s evidentiary hearing in a bid to disqualify Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, but we had to stop watching the hearing shortly after Willis took the stand. It turned out to be quite the spectacle. . 

For anyone in need of a refresher: In January, Ashleigh Merchant, a lawyer for Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, alleged in a court filing that Willis had an undisclosed romantic relationship with a prosecutor on her team, Nathan Wade, which began before Willis hired Wade as a prosecutor on the case in November 2021 and resulted in Willis receiving thousands of dollars’ worth of undisclosed gifts in the form of vacations for the couple to Aruba, Belize, and Napa Valley, the bank records for which emerged in Wade’s divorce proceedings. In court filings earlier this month, Willis and Wade finally acknowledged the existence of their relationship but claimed that it began in Spring 2022, after Wade had been hired on the case, and that Willis and Wade had alternated in paying for their personal travel. That’s where things stood Thursday morning.  

On Thursday morning, the defense lawyers called two witnesses who they claimed could testify that the relationship began before Spring 2022, thus exposing both Willis and Wade to false statements charges. One, a former “good friend” of Willis named Robin Yeartie, did just that, claiming that Willis had personally told her as early as 2019 that she had been romantic with Wade, and that she had observed the couple hugging and kissing in public prior to Wade’s hiring in late 2021. The other, Wade’s former law partner and divorce attorney Terrence Bradley, was mostly prevented from testifying Thursday by the state, which claimed that all of his communications with Wade fell under attorney-client privilege. Further, the state claimed that Merchant was lying about having spoken with Bradley and demanded that she be sanctioned by the court. But today, Bradley was recalled to testify again and admitted that he had had text and phone conversations with Merchant in which he described Willis and Wade’s romantic relationship, though he professed not to remember any of the exchanges until prompted with phone records by Merchant. Those included a text exchange in which Merchant asked Bradley if anyone would be willing to swear an affidavit testifying to the existence of the relationship, and Bradley said no because “no one would freely burn that bridge.” Bradley also revealed, during questioning by Trump’s lawyer Steven Sadow, that he had read and confirmed the accuracy of Merchant’s original January motion. 

Wade also testified Thursday, as we briefly covered in yesterday’s edition. His testimony was strained and often lawyerly, sticking to the timeline of the relationship offered in his and Willis’ court filings, and he seemed at times to labor to avoid perjuring himself. For instance, after testifying that he had traveled with Willis only in 2022 and 2023, he refused to definitively rule out travel with her in 2021, saying only that he did not “recall” any travel with her that year; he also admitted to visiting Willis’ condo at least 10 times in 2021 before being appointed special prosecutor, but denied the visits were romantic in nature. He denied giving Willis any gifts—which Willis would have been required to disclose if they amounted to more than $100 in a year—since Willis had reimbursed him in cash for everything he had bought her, for which there were no records. Wade was also caught in what appeared to be a series of blatant lies in December 2021 court filings from his divorce, in which he claimed never to have had sexual relations with, or “entertained,” any other woman during the period of his marriage, “including the period of separation”—i.e., up to the date of the filing. Wade’s reasoning was that because his marriage had become “irretrievably broken” in 2015, he no longer considered himself married after that point and thus did not believe he had to report his relations with Willis. As far as creative legal theories go, it’s up there with a 2020 scandal Wade was involved in: Asked to produce records for what he claimed had been a monthslong investigation, Wade said he had no documents, communications, notes, or written records related to the case since he kept all the records inside his head. 

Finally, there was Willis, who came out swinging. In her first few minutes on the stand, a visibly irate Willis—wearing what The New York Times referred to as a “glowing magenta” dress that some social media critics alleged was on backward—called Merchant a “liar” and her court filings “lies” at least a dozen times, accused the defense team’s interests of being “contrary to democracy,” and said that Yeartie had “betrayed their friendship.” She attacked, lectured, filibustered, and responded to simple yes or no questions with lengthy diatribes, at times verging into discussions of Wade’s sexual function and the nature of relations between men and women. Although she admitted to paying rent to her then friend Yeartie via Cash App, she said she had paid Wade back for all of their travel in cash, which she took from a hoard of up to $15,000 in cash that she kept at her home at all times, for which she kept no records, neither of cash withdrawals nor of her payments to Wade. Her father testified Friday that he had, in fact, always taught Willis to keep large amounts of cash in her home, explaining that this was “a Black thing.” That may be, but it’s nonetheless remarkable that a district attorney, who would know that she is prohibited from receiving even small gifts from contractors with her office, would fail to keep any financial records of reimbursements for thousands of dollars of gifts with a contractor she was sleeping with—a fact she never disclosed until Merchant’s filing brought it to light. 

Media reactions to the hearings have been split, and the judge in the case, Scott McAfee, has given little indication as to how he might rule on the disqualification issue. Working in favor of the defense, however, is that it doesn’t necessarily have to show impropriety on Willis’ part—only an “appearance of impropriety.” Willis and Wade’s story about the cash hoard is clever, since it can’t be checked against any records and is therefore unfalsifiable. We’ll find out soon if that’s enough to save Willis’ case against Trump.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Is weed kosher?

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The Rest

→The Russian dissident and anticorruption campaigner Alexei Navalny died Friday in a remote Arctic penal colony, where he was serving a 30-year sentence on various trumped-up charges for his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He was 47 years old. Trained as a lawyer, Navalny entered politics in the late 2000s and rose to prominence as a blogger and regime critic after he was arrested for protesting against electoral fraud in Russia’s 2011 parliamentary elections. He ran for mayor of Moscow in 2013, winning 27% of the vote, but was barred from contesting the 2018 presidential election over bogus “embezzlement” charges. In 2020, Navalny nearly died after being poisoned by Novichok nerve agent, which has been used to assassinate regime critics, but returned to Russia after recovering in a German hospital, telling a German magazine, “I will not give Putin the gift of not returning to Russia.” He was detained in January 2021, shortly after recovering, and remained in prison until his death. 

→Quote of the Day: 

Iran sold about $1 billion in weapons from March 2022 to March 2023, three times as much as the previous year, Deputy Defense Minister Mahdi Farahi said in November. In a tally that omits smuggled weapons, Iran became the world’s 16th-biggest arms seller in 2022 with $123 million in exports, a jump from $20 million in 2017, when Iran was the 33rd-biggest exporter, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

That’s from a Friday report in The Wall Street Journal about Iran’s booming arms exports. The paper also notes that Hamas used Iranian-supplied explosives and antitank warheads during the Oct. 7 attacks, which reflected “military intelligence that could only have come from a state actor like Iran,” according to Israeli Lt. Col. Idan Sharon-Kettler, a weapons expert quoted in the report. 

→A New York judge on Friday ordered Donald Trump to pay a penalty of $350 million and barred him and both of his sons from serving in top roles at any companies in the state of New York for three years, including his own. The judgment comes from a civil fraud case in which Trump was accused of exaggerating his net worth to receive more favorable terms from bankers and insurers. Trump’s net worth is estimated at about $2.6 billion, much of it in real estate, so the judgment wouldn’t bankrupt him, even if it stands up on appeal. But it could severely deplete his cash reserves, making it more difficult for him to fund his presidential campaign. 

→Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s trial of Donald Trump is scheduled to start on March 25 and is expected to last six weeks, according to a Thursday announcement from Judge Juan Merchan. Bragg has charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to so-called hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels, to a Trump Tower doorman, and to another woman who claimed a sexual relationship with Trump. The date means that a verdict will almost certainly be returned before the November election, but most legal experts on both sides of the aisle regard Bragg’s case as the weakest of the four facing the former president. 

→On Wednesday, meanwhile, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to deny a request from Trump to pause the election interference case pending his appeal of a recent D.C. Circuit Court ruling that rejected his claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. Smith reasons that the public has a “compelling interest in a prompt disposition of the case.” Why? Smith doesn’t say—or rather, he says there is “a national interest in seeing the crimes alleged in this case resolved promptly,” without mentioning the election. As Washington Examiner’s Byron York points out in a Thursday column, however, Department of Justice rules state:

Federal prosecutors and agents may never select the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.

Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, a Trump critic, writes at Lawfare:

If this were any other defendant than Donald Trump, the rush to trial—which cannot possibly give the Trump legal team adequate time to prepare its defense—would be deemed wildly unfair. Prosecutors and judges typically give defendants significantly more temporal leeway in trials of lesser magnitude with less severe charges.

Even assuming the worst about a potential second Trump term, Goldsmith writes, a conviction of Trump that relied on the Biden DOJ violation of written guidelines, prosecutorial norms, and arguably Trump’s due process rights (by denying his legal team adequate time to prepare) “could be deemed illegitimate and unfair by approximately half the country.”

The damage to our institutions from this outcome—to belief in the legitimacy of the presidential electoral process, and to the integrity of the Justice Department and the possibility of apolitical justice—is unknowable, but it is very likely to be serious and with us for a long time. I will simply say that it is not obvious to me that this outcome would be better for the nation than the plausible scenarios if Trump is not federally tried before the election—especially since Trump might lose even if his federal trials are delayed.

→In our Thread of the Day, Benjamin Weingarten of RealClearInvestigations compiles a running tally of the Biden administration’s various attempts to hamstring Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks and force, dating from early October to the present. While we’ve also been covering these developments, it’s helpful to read them all in one place for a sense of how consistent the administration’s posture has been from the beginning. The thread is too long for us to post as screenshots, so click on the image below to open it in X.

→We’ll have a shortened version of The Scroll on Monday for President’s Day and be back with your regularly scheduled programming on Tuesday. Enjoy the long weekend.

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The Conservative Movement Moves on Cannabis

A recent vote found overwhelming halachic support for medical marijuana—and narrower, qualified support for recreational use

By Paula Jacobs

In December, the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly Committee on Jewish Law and Standards—which sets halachic (Jewish law) policy for affiliated rabbis and the Conservative/Masorti movement worldwide—approved a teshuva (responsum) called “Medical and Recreational Cannabis Usage” that addresses social, legal, and medical issues around cannabis, and incorporates Jewish legal principles about balancing personal safety and health with the mandate of preserving life. (A teshuva is meant to serve as a teaching tool, providing guidance to Conservative/Masorti rabbis and their constituents worldwide on key issues.)

“Two of the most important and significant principles in Torah are that we should choose life and protect life,” said Rabbi Pamela Barmash, CJLS chair and professor of Hebrew Bible and biblical Hebrew at Washington University in St. Louis.

This teshuva represents the first time that the Conservative movement has ruled on cannabis usage. “Until recently there was no point of talking about cannabis because it was illegal,” said Rabbi Elliot Dorff, rector and distinguished service professor of philosophy at the American Jewish University. “But now that many [countries] have approved cannabis, including Israel, it’s important to understand what Jewish tradition says to us. Just because something is permitted in civil law doesn’t mean that Jewish law should allow it.”

Since the late 1980s, the CJLS has applied Jewish law to medical issues, explains Dorff, a committee member since 1984, including stints as its chair. The author of several medical-related responsa, Dorff voted in favor of this teshuva because of its thorough research of social, legal, and medical issues, as well as its comparison of marijuana with cigarette smoking; Dorff himself discussed these issues in a 2006 article called “Judaism and Marijuana.”

Previous CJLS teshuvot have addressed such medical-related topics as end-of-life medical care, provisioning health care, abortion, and COVID pandemic concerns such as face-masking, loneliness, and mental health.

According to CJLS rules, the passage of a teshuva requires six affirmative votes. This teshuva was divided into two separate piskei din, or rulings. The first concerned medical usage. By a vote of 19-1 with no abstentions, the CJLS approved the consumption of “medically prescribed cannabis under the continued supervision of a trusted and accredited medical professional.”

The second psak (ruling) concerned recreational cannabis, incorporating six distinct rulings that address: when usage is deemed safe and permitted by civil law, smoking, consumption by youth, consumption in an official Jewish communal context, blessings for edible forms, and consumption on fast days. It was endorsed by a vote of 9-6 with five abstentions. Committee members may also submit a written concurrence or dissent for distribution to RA members and for posting in its teshuvot database.

Committee member Rabbi Rachel Safman voted in favor of the first ruling on medical cannabis, citing the plethora of evidence supporting medical use, consistent with Jewish law that prioritizes health. However, she abstained from voting in favor of recreational cannabis because scientific evidence is not as well documented, particularly for young people with developing brains. “I felt a condemnation was too severe a position,” she said, “but I was not going to endorse marijuana for recreational purposes, especially for a youth population.”

Also concerned about the lack of regulation and limited research data, Rabbi Tracee Rosen voted against recreational cannabis usage, and is writing a dissent opinion. “There is a growing body of evidence that especially high-potency THC products are triggering psychosis in young people. I would like to see that we don’t make any move to approve from a halachic perspective until there is more knowledge and oversight of the product,” she said. “There cannot be recreational marijuana until there are labeling laws and we know what levels are safe for usage. That requires peer reviews and studies on the impact of cannabis usage on teens and young adults at the national level.”

While they don’t oppose recreational marijuana consumption, Rabbis Barry Leff and David J. Fine voted against the psak about recreational cannabis usage. They authored a dissenting opinion reflecting disagreement with the section that prohibits recreational use of cannabis in its smoked form (per Rabbi Reuven Hammer’s 2020 responsum, “Teshuva Concerning Smoking”). “I voted against this because it doesn’t make sense to ban marijuana smoking based on tobacco smoking,” Leff told me. “I think that is faulty logic.” But since there was no option to vote against that single item, he voted against the whole psak.

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Rabbi Raysh Weiss—who does not use cannabis herself—began thinking about this issue in October 2018 when the government of Canada passed the Cannabis Act, legalizing and regulating cannabis according to a strict legal framework. At the time, Weiss was living in Canada, serving as congregational rabbi at Shaar Shalom Congregation and the Jewish chaplain at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “It was a hot topic in the university town where I was living and I felt it was an important conversation,” she told me. “I didn’t know much about cannabis usage but became curious as people approached me in public and private forums, although we were not going to use it in the community. My entry point into the conversation was Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which I had been reading, that discussed the war on drugs relative to the mass incarceration crisis in the U.S. Her book made me understand in a whole new lens the extent to which the war on drugs enabled the systemic backpedaling of the major advances of the civil rights movement.”

Weiss soon began teaching about cannabis from a Jewish perspective, conducting a series of classes for her Conservative synagogue, a session for the university’s Hillel, and one-on-one conversations with college students. She also started researching the impact on individual rights of the public consumption of tobacco, given the risk from secondhand smoke as outlined in the 1964 Office of the Surgeon General of the United States report on smoking and health. This issue was also highly personal because of the pungent smell permeating her home which shared a back parking area with shops frequented by “cannabis-enthusiastic” young men.

In March 2021, Barmash invited Weiss to prepare a teshuva in response to the numerous requests that the Rabbinical Assembly and the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards had received from member congregational rabbis and healthcare chaplains for guidance about Jewish law on marijuana. (Committee members as well as RA member rabbis can write teshuvot.) The committee meets each fall and spring, reviewing the many teshuvot (approximately six to 12 are received each season) submitted by rabbis in the Conservative movement. Weiss submitted her first draft that fall for review and comments. The teshuva underwent three revisions before final acceptance. (Typically, each teshuva undergoes two or three readings before the final vote.)

In researching this teshuva, Weiss drew upon scientific and medical research, statistical and sociological studies, as well as biblical and rabbinic sources about the injunction to preserve life—as well as Reuven Hammer’s 2020 Conservative movement teshuva on smoking and the Reform movement’s 1984 responsum by Rabbi Walter Jacob that permits medical usage of drugs, addressing halachic issues in detail. Subsequently, in 2001 and 2003 the Reform movement passed resolutions supporting the medical usage of marijuana for patients with intractable pain and certain medical conditions under medical supervision. A spokesperson for the Union for Reform Judaism told Tablet that the movement has not altered its position supporting medical use of marijuana since its November 2003 resolution.

“What makes Jewish law interesting is that it is not legal or illegal, but we are talking more about the ethical contours that permeate every aspect of our lives,” explained Weiss. “What Judaism asks of us is more than just following the law but invites us to explore how we can elevate our day-to-day interactions. Every choice we make daily has an ethical element.”

Revising this teshuva for over two years presented Weiss with many challenges: One issue was the limited scientific research and longitudinal studies in the U.S. about the dangers of cannabis consumption and how different genetic bodies may react differently to the substance. “This was an ethically challenging stance for me personally,” she said, “because when I talk about the dangers of consumption, I don’t want to promote a culture where it becomes normative to casually consume cannabis without consideration of its effect on a person.”

Meanwhile, rapidly changing cannabis legislation, both in the U.S. and abroad, required frequent revisions in order to keep pace with recent developments: More than 40 U.S. states have legalized medical cannabis, with recreational usage legalized in D.C. and 24 states; Delaware, Minnesota, and Ohio legalized it in 2023. Marijuana has also been legalized in many other countries around the world.

Looking ahead, Weiss expects this teshuva may evolve. “If forthcoming medical research changes our current understanding, this teshuva is subject to change,” she said. “What I am saying is that it makes sense from a halachic standpoint to allow the usage of medical and recreational cannabis within specific responsible limitations based on the sources we have available to us now, both scientifically and from Jewish legal literature.”

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“Anecdotal evidence indicates that marijuana is a gateway drug for those that are addictive,” said Barmash, the CJLS chair. Nevertheless, she voted in favor of both parts of the teshuva because she agrees that medical marijuana is acceptable and this ruling advises those who need it under the supervision of a medical professional, while the second part gives a nuanced permission based on the principles of Halacha. She supports the medical use of cannabis, while emphasizing that recreational use requires further research to ensure there is no unreasonable risk, particularly for children: “How do we balance the risks to those whose brains are still growing, especially for young children where CBD gummies look like candy and who may accidentally consume one?”

Therefore, Barmash urges adults to store cannabis products safely out of the reach of children. In 2023, Pediatrics, the Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics reported increases in unintentional pediatric ingestions of cannabis edibles after legalization. In states with legalized cannabis, regional poison centers have seen an increase in calls regarding exposures and in visits to pediatric emergency care centers.

Finally, as the teshuva emphasizes, for the Jewish community, halachic issues require consideration: The blessing Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu melech ha’olam shehakol niyah bidvaro. (Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, at whose word all came to be) should be recited before eating cannabis products. Consuming cannabis products in a Jewish communal setting is prohibited. As for kashrut, the Orthodox Union has certified medical marijuana products by Vireo Health and the Chicago Rabbinical Council has certified marijuana for medical use, but some argue that kashrut also involves ethical considerations. “Kashrut should be about regulating the possible danger in the product and, also, cannabis products may have varying amounts of CBD,” explained Barmash.

As to the significance of this teshuva, Weiss sums it up: “Any major world issue has its place in the ongoing Jewish legal conversation, and this is not an exception. With this particular issue I want to emphasize how we are weighing the relative benefits and risks and how can we apply our traditional Jewish wisdom as we navigate contemporary social issues.”