March 15, 2024: Fani Willis Stays Alive

White House approved Schumer speech; The White House and CAIR; Middle schoolers arrested for racism

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The Big Story

On Friday, the lawfare campaign against Donald Trump received a major break. Judge Scott McAfee declined to disqualify Fulton County, Georgia’s District Attorney Fani Willis over allegations that she had accepted improper gifts from a contractor—her lover, Nathan Wade—and then lied to the court about both the initial allegations and the timing of her relationship with Wade. Instead, McAfee ordered Willis to either remove Wade from her RICO election interference case against Donald Trump and his associates or step down from the case herself. 

McAfee ruled that while there was an “appearance of a conflict of interest” in the case, the contradictory witness testimony failed to establish that there was a real conflict of interest. On the question of the gifts, McAfee found that Willis’ explanation—i.e., that she had reimbursed Wade for thousands of dollars’ worth of purchases using a hoard of untraceable cash for which she kept no records or receipts—was not “so incredible as to be inherently unbelievable” and that there was no evidence that Willis had initiated the prosecution for her or Wade’s financial benefit. He was scathing, however, about Willis’ behavior: “This finding is by no means an indication that the Court condones [Willis’] tremendous lapse in judgment or the unprofessional manner of the District Attorney’s testimony during the evidentiary hearing.” 

Perhaps the more serious question, however, was on whether Willis and Wade had lied to the court. On this question, McAfee was even more scathing—but here, too, he in essence threw up his hands. He noted that the defense had raised “reasonable questions” about whether Willis and Wade had “testified untruthfully about the timing of their relationship,” he declared that there was an “odor of mendacity” about Willis and Wade’s conduct and testimony, and he referred frankly to Wade’s “patently unpersuasive explanations” for why he lied in interrogatories submitted in his divorce case, which indicated “a willingness on his part to wrongly conceal his relationship with the District Attorney.” As Techno Fog put it on X: “Judge McAfee rules that only one potential liar can prosecute the case—but not both potential liars.”

Despite noting that Willis and Wade both gave the appearance of lying and that Wade demonstrated his willingness to lie, McAfee stopped short of calling them liars, ruling that neither side was able to “conclusively establish” when the pair’s romantic relationship began. That let Willis and Wade off the hook for their perjurious testimony that they had not started dating until 2022, after Willis hired Wade. While the rest of McAfee’s ruling is reasonable enough, this part, in our view, is chickenshit. To briefly review what we learned during the hearings:

• A former close friend of Willis’, Robin Yeartie, testified that Willis had told her personally that the relationship began in 2019. 

• Wade’s former law partner and divorce lawyer, Terrence Bradley, confirmed to defense lawyer Ashleigh Merchant that the relationship began prior to 2022, indicated his willingness to testify to that effect, and signed off on Merchant’s motion alleging as much. Before the hearing, however, Willis’ office raised the prospect of prosecuting Bradley for sexual assault and asserted that all of his communications with Wade were covered by attorney-client privilege. Bradley, after attempting to get out of testifying, then did a complete 180 from what he told Merchant, alternately claiming privilege, professing not to remember anything, and asserting that anything he had told Merchant was mere “rumor” and “speculation.”

• The defense also produced cell phone records showing more than 2,000 voice calls and 12,000 text messages between Willis and Wade in 2021, and that Wade had visited Willis’ condo on at least 35 occasions in 2021 and spent the night several times. Willis testified that Wade visited the condo no more than 10 times in 2021 and that he had never spent the night. 

And yet, McAfee effectively dismissed all of this, judging that Bradley was too dishonest to be believed on anything and that Yeartie’s testimony lacked “context and detail,” while seeming to disregard the cell phone evidence altogether. 

Shortly before The Scroll closed on Friday, Wade submitted his resignation. Willis accepted, praising Wade’s for the “professionalism and dignity” with which he has conducted himself while enduring “unjustified attacks in the media and in court.” The case will now proceed, with the “odor of mendacity” still hanging over the DA’s office. 

IN THE BACK PAGES: A Persian Jew finds her inner Esther

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The Rest

→In our write-up of Sen. Chuck Schumer’s anti-Bibi speech yesterday, we quoted Tony Badran and Michael Doran’s 2021 prediction that “voices in the media will deliver a harsh reproach to Israel, which the Biden team will have scripted but will prefer not to deliver directly.” That was a good call: Semafor’s Jay Solomon reported on Thursday night that Schumer submitted his speech to the White House, which reviewed it but did not block it. On Friday, President Biden said of Schumer, “He made a good speech, and I think he expressed serious concerns shared not only by him, but by many Americans.” 

→In a Wednesday speech, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that pressure on the United States is key to the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance’s victory in Gaza. According to minutes from the speech translated by Abu Ali Express on Thursday, Nasrallah gave special thanks to the “many who are protesting in the U.S. today.” He went on:

Biden is not afraid of the world, nor of the international community, nor of Allah, nor of the history books, nor of anything. Biden is afraid of only one thing: that his policy and conduct in Gaza will lead to his loss in the presidential elections.

The remarkable thing here is not that Nasrallah is correct, but that the Obama-Biden realignment policy is so monumentally stupid that Nasrallah and the Iranians cannot wrap their heads around it and are forced to make up fantasies according to which U.S. policy in the Middle East is dictated by 100,000 primary voters in Michigan. Never mind that U.S. behavior in the Gaza war is entirely consistent with the posture of the second-term Obama administration and the Biden administration prior to Oct. 7, and was indeed predicted by analysts critical of that posture. But hey, Hassan, we agree! It doesn’t make any sense!

→For instance, imagine trying to make sense of our Post of the Day if you’re the non-English-speaking leader of a Lebanese terror militia:

But wait, it gets better! Politico reported Thursday that several Chicago Muslim leaders had refused invitations to meet with the White House, among them the director of the Chicago branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Ahmed Rehab, who gave a quote for the story. White House spokesman Andrew Bates, apparently realizing that the administration had publicly disavowed CAIR in December after CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad said he was “happy to see” the Oct. 7 attacks, then rushed to tell reporters later on Thursday that CAIR had not been invited to the Chicago meeting and was “never” invited to White House meetings—a claim seemingly belied by this publicly available photo of CAIR representative Robert McCaw at a May 2023 White House meeting:

→An update on Wednesday’s Big Story about the national security state and video games: X user @FuckKoroks (yes, we know) went through a January 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office titled “Countering Violent Extremism: FBI and DHS Need Strategies and Goals for Sharing Threat Information with Social Media and Gaming Companies.” There’s too much in the report—and in a Thursday document dump from America First Legal on similar programs from USAID, which we’ll cover on Monday—to summarize here, but one thing caught our eye. A page listed all of the “experts” on gaming and “violent extremism” who helped brainstorm strategies for the FBI and DHS to monitor gaming, and it’s a counter-disinformation all-star team, including representatives from the Center for Internet Security, the Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab, and the Middlebury Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism—which was a co-recipient of the $700,000 DHS grant we wrote about on Wednesday, alongside the videogame nonprofit Take This and Logically, the British AI censorship company. 

The list of experts also included three employees of the Anti-Defamation League. Funnily enough, on Thursday evening, the ADL posted this on X:

The linked piece, from a “policy advisor” at NYU’s Center for Business and Human Rights, calls on Congress to bring video games under the scope of the Digital Services Act and ensure that game companies comply with its “extensive requirements”—including by “countering disinformation and extremism.” 

→Is The New York Times learning something? Here is one of its headlines, plus the first two paragraphs of the article, from the paper’s Friday morning live feed: 

Sure, the Times presents the story as a he-said, she-said, leading with the Hamas narrative and only then presenting the Israeli counterpoint before throwing up its hands at its inability to “verify” either account, without informing readers that every alleged IDF massacre claimed by the Gaza Health Ministry since Oct. 7 has been debunked, usually within 24 hours. But we’re grading on a curve here, and this is at least an improvement over the Gray Lady’s reporting on the last fake aid convoy massacre, which featured a hero-slot video titled “Gazans Attacked While Trying to Get Aid.” On Friday morning, the IDF said it had concluded, after an “intensive preliminary review,” that Israeli forces “did not open fire at the aid convoy at Kuwait Square.” The IDF added that the Health Ministry’s claims were “a smear campaign” designed to instigate violence elsewhere timed to the first Friday of Ramadan. 

→Even this minimal concession to reality, however, is likely to anger the sorts of people that Times employees went to Yale with and socialize with on the weekends. On Thursday morning, pro-Palestinian protesters blockaded the Queens facility that prints The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post before descending on the Times’ Midtown headquarters later in the morning. Covering their faces with medical masks and keffiyehs, the protesters charged the Times with “manufacturing consent for genocide” with its coverage of the Gaza war. The paper’s coverage of Hamas’ rape of Israeli women has been a particular sore spot, prompting an external pressure campaign from media Hamasnik Ryan Grim of The Intercept, sourced to and presumably backed by allies within the Times, accusing the Times of “galvanizing the Israeli war effort” through its reporting. The Times announced Thursday that it would not be swayed by the protests, but as both common sense and The Scroll will tell you, people tend to care quite a lot about what their friends think. Which is why it’s interesting to learn that, say, a lead producer for The Daily (Eric Krupke)—the Times podcast at the center of the controversy—is roommates with Jabari Brisport, a far-left New York politician who has called Israel’s campaign a “genocide” and referred to every Palestinian death as an act of Israeli murder, as Armin Rosen reported in The Scroll on Monday. We have no doubt that Krupke and Brisport will vigorously debate the NYT protests while watching Shogun together on the futon. 

→A self-described “close family friend” of John Barnett, the Boeing whistleblower who died of an apparent suicide on Saturday, said in an interview with Charleston’s ABC affiliate that Barnett told her, “If anything happens to me, it’s not suicide.” Barnett’s death came shortly before he was scheduled to continue his testimony in a lawsuit against the company. The 62-year-old had worked as a quality-control engineer at Boeing but left the job after clashing with his superiors over what he saw as persistent safety issues at the company’s Charleston plant—concerns he later shared with the public. Barnett’s lawyers have also expressed skepticism about their client’s suicide and have called on Charleston police to conduct a full investigation. A Boeing employee at the Charleston plant where Barnett used to work told the New York Post on Friday, “A lot of people are skeptical, because he made some pretty powerful enemies.” 

→Massachusetts police on Thursday charged six middle schoolers with “threat to commit a crime” and two others with “interference with civil rights” for posting racist messages—including slurs and references to a “mock slave auction”—in a Snapchat group, the Washington Examiner reports. In a statement, Hampden, Massachusetts’ District Attorney Anthony Gulluni said: 

There is no question that the alleged behavior of these six juveniles is vile, cruel, and contemptible. Seeing it, and facing the reality that these thoughts, that this ugliness, can exist within middle school students, here, in this community, in 2024 is discouraging, unsettling, and deeply frustrating.

The behavior may well have been “contemptible” and a matter for the school to handle, but we would humbly submit that the existence of “vile … thoughts” within the heads of “middle school students” has not traditionally been a matter for law enforcement in the United States. 

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

Exile or Diaspora? by Pierre Birnbaum

A famous debate between the 20th-century Jewish historians Salo Baron, Yitzhak Baer, and Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi eerily prefigures the current rise of political antisemitism in America

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Finding My Inner Esther

Changing my name changed my life for the better

By Catherine M. Zadeh

As Jews in Iran, my parents understandably avoided giving me a recognizably Jewish name—but they also missed the memo on giving me any Hebrew name at all. My father, a lover of all things French, named me Catherine, wishing for his daughter to essentially assimilate into the new country he would immigrate to, as if a name could do just that.

Fast forward to my New York wedding, where the rabbi threw me a curveball by asking for my Hebrew name. Apparently, “I don’t have one” wasn’t the right answer. I had to choose one, right then and there. The first name he suggested was Esther, thinking it was fitting because of my Persian background and some possible distant relation to Queen Esther. But, honestly, Esther sounded more like a name for my grandma than for a cool, modern Jewish girl like me. So, he offered a few more names and I stopped him at Ketura—because why not have a name that sounds vaguely like Catherine?

For 25 years, I was Ketura, and married life with my husband, David, was a blissful roller coaster. To sort out my emotional baggage, a friend dragged me to a clairvoyant who asked my name. He repeated my name “Catherine” a few times, paused, remained pensive, and then declared: “You are regal, a beautiful strong queen.” I thought it was strange, but why not?

Motivated to find even deeper meaning, I started to attend Kabbalah classes. It was during one of those classes that the teacher explained the concept of Hebrew names as spiritual identifiers. Basically, a Hebrew name serves as a vessel for our unique traits and divine gifts, a conduit channeling spiritual energy. So, perplexed, I went home, frantically Googled Ketura, and found out that she was one of Abraham’s handmaids. Not exactly the empowering revelation I was looking for. I did not like Ketura. I did not want to be a Ketura.

I reached out to my rabbi and asked him about the possibility of a spiritual makeover through a name change. Much to my surprise, he gave a thumbs-up, so I decided to make a swap: Ketura for Esther. Who wants to be a handmaid when you can be a queen, right?

Since then, I’ve felt this gradual transformation, making way for Esther to take the throne—a “queen” by choice. And, to be honest, it had a domino effect on everything. My whole vibe has changed, and my relationships—including my marriage—are all the better for it. And remarkably, this shift didn’t stop at my personal life. It’s like my newfound queenly spirit had a direct line to my creative and professional side, leading me to make the boldest move of my life and open my first gallery on Madison Avenue. You see, besides being a devoted wife and a dedicated mother, I am also a jewelry designer, an entrepreneur, and what started as a simple hobby, is today a brand of luxury jewelry that channels Esther’s strength of character and courage, drawing inspiration from the myriad cultures that have woven into the fabric of my life.