 We are going to start today as we so often must with Donald Trump. We'll talk about twists and turns in two of the legal cases he's managed to get involved in. The first, the election interference case in Georgia, which was guestwritten and produced last week by Shonda Rhimes. The case took a Shondaland-esque turn when one of Trump's co-defendants accused Fulton County district attorney Fawney Willis, and yes, I will be trying to pronounce all of the names correctly in this podcast, unlike Matt Walsh, accused her of a conflict of interests. Specifically, it was alleged that her personal relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, whom she hired unsupervised, had resulted in personal gains for her, including what sounded like a really nice trip to Aruba. Both of the lovebirds took the stand and spilled just like a tremendous amount of tea. Like, there was so many little, like, details about their relationship. It was delicious. It got so emotional at one point that the judge actually had to call a five-minute recess just for everyone to, like, chill out. Willis denied any conflict of interest, insisted the whole matter was a diversion from the very important case against those who had conspired to overturn the 2020 election. Of course, this case needs to be wrapped up quickly in order for the 2024 election to proceed in a timely manner. She also complained that she felt kind of uncomfortable and violated by the court's scrutiny of her personal life, which is a little rich. Zach, let's start with you. What did you take away from this whole mess? My takeaway was that, first of all, I think there is a legitimate issue for the defense team to be raising just because it creates, it does seem to create an incentive at the very least for that if she's in a romantic relationship to, like, drag things out to if he's picking up the bill in Aruba or whatever. So, you know, none of this necessarily does anything to undermine the strength of the case against Trump or his team. But it's one of those situations where if you're going to be the one who's going after the ex-president, if you're going to take that on, you'd better be above reproach. And she definitely failed on that dimension. But as to the merits of the case, you know, I had a long conversation with Ilya Soman, the law professor at GMU and a writer at Volunt Conspiracy back in September. And he believes this case is very sound. I recommend that for a deep dive into the legal details of Georgia. But like one of the really damning aspects for me that really stowed out was the very first charge, which had to do with the speech Trump gave on election night when he first made the voter fraud accusations across various states, including Georgia. And the damning thing about it to me is that the prosecutors have evidence that that speech was drafted four days before the election. So that's like just one of many indicators that this was preplanned. There are other moments from the testimony of one of his aides that he told his chief of staff that he doesn't want people to know that we lost because it's embarrassing. Or, you know, according to Mike Pence, he told him you're too honest for saying that he didn't have the power to reject electors. So how much of any of that is convincing to a jury? You never know. But I I've got concerns with how far reaching the case is in terms of roping some of Trump's attorneys for their legal advice. I think we want to give attorney client relationships a really wide birth in this country. But I'm so I'm skeptical of some of the legal particularities. But when you look at it from just observing this guy who's seeking reelection, the person at the center of the case, Donald Trump, I think it does paint a pretty damning portrait, regardless of what Fannie Willis and her boyfriend are doing in Aruba. Nick, I think one thing about this case that sort of keeps striking me is that it seems like it's possible that the Trump team's strategy is just to create two sets of facts or two narratives. This is a pretty standard Trump thing. And maybe I've just played into it by giving this like salacious description of what's going on with Willis instead of focusing on the core facts of the case. Do you do you think that's what's happening here? Or do you think this is a legitimate issue where, you know, we need to hold prosecutors to account when they misbehave? Well, I'm a big fan of alternative facts. And I hope that we, before the election, start talking about the Bowling Green massacre, which we really haven't spent a lot of time discussing. I wonder why? I mean, for me, the takeaway from all of this is how stupid and amateurish Trump's opponents are. He's he's a wreck. He's a horror show. He's a dumpster fire, whatever you want to call him. And then how do you get to a point where you are prosecuting a case against him like this? And then you don't just chum the waters. It's like you're taking the entire bait box and dumping it into a shark tank. It's so unbelievably incompetent and stupid to do that. And that happens again and again, where Trump, you know, there's an easy layup against Trump and people will just screw it up by being idiots about it or something like that. More broadly, though, I find, you know, if the idea is that Trump is a baby who could not admit that he lost the election and then started, you know, working the phones to find people in the state of Georgia, who would say like, OK, yeah, yeah, I'll go along with you. I'll go along with you. That is awful behavior. And I think it's disqualifying of him. It's among the many reasons I would never vote for him. But I don't know that this is the type of thing that we want to start saying is criminal behavior and, you know, you've got to do time or you've got to pay massive fines and things like that. It just seems to me two things can be true at the same time that what Trump did and and by writing a speech ahead of time, not acknowledging that he lost an election, which he, you know, he he has not even acknowledged that he actually won in 2016 yet. So why would we expect him to admit that he lost in 2020? You know, but that is not necessarily criminal, but it is incredibly awful and unseemly. And in many profound ways, it should disqualify him in the voters eyes from winning again, which I don't think he'll win. But, you know, the idea that we are going to litigate all of this kind of stuff through the court strikes me as a really bad path to be going down. And then it gets even worse when you start like icing the walkway by having idiot prosecutors who end up dragging in all kinds of useless, you know, things that get in the way like the funny Williams, you know, Shonda Rhimes storyline. I'm going to award you two two successful metaphor uses in that answer. But neither of which were mixed at all. Straightforward, very good. Just trying, just trying. In the absence of Matt Welch, we all get better, I think is what we learned here today. Yes. Yes. Eric, you are a fan of, I don't know, law and order. Maybe are you sometimes? It depends. Justice. Not the show. You're a fan of, yeah, although, should we do the little, like, dun dun? Yeah. What, you know, what do you what do you make of this case? And in particular, if you have, if you have any thoughts on the role of the use of cash money in this case, I don't know. Reasons own Jerry Tuchilly wrote about this a little bit. One of the details of this case is Fani Willis insisting that she paid back Wade for all of her portions of the various trips that they went on. And that she did so from cash reserves that she kept around the house because that's what her daddy told her she should do. And that was her most likable moment for me. But maybe maybe you have other more. As a believer in keeping cash reserves around the house, I can respect that. Yeah, sure. I think Nick's basically right, though, that like both things can be right. And I mean, to your earlier point, right, about like, are there kind of two parallel stories here? There really are. And I understand why this is probably difficult for the public to keep track of because honestly, it's been difficult for me to keep track of. And I get paid money to pay attention to this stuff on a daily or weekly basis. But like the acute question to the hearing that happened this past week is whether or not Fani Willis is whether she should be disqualified from the case. And I think it's pretty clear that I think she falls short of the standard of actually being disqualified. Like that's the outcome that seems right to me there. But at the same time, I think she should probably just step aside anyway. Like I think this does it raises a significant enough question about her ability to do the job that the voters of the public in Georgia expects her to be able to do. I think that's been impugned at this point to where like the whole Trump case and any other prosecutions that she's involved in would just be better served if she was no longer part of it. So that's I think my first answer to the sort of the one question is like whether I think she would just make this whole situation a lot easier and smoother if she stepped aside, either recused herself from the case or maybe even stepped down entirely. I think that would be an appropriate outcome there. And then there is I mean, I think Zach basically hit it on the on the Trump side of this thing that yeah, I mean, it seems like he knew from the beginning that he had lost the election. There was reporting even at that time when you go back to like December of 2020, January of 2021, a lot of reporting about the extent to which people close to Trump tried to tell him, hey, Mr. President, like you lost, he was, you know, in public, maybe putting up a persona, but I think in private, he was aware of this. And then we've seen and I'll just plug, you know, some of the reporting that I did last week to some other like drips that came out of the situation in Georgia is that true the vote, which is this conservative group that was behind a lot of these allegations about supposed, you know, widespread voter fraud in Georgia. Certainly this type of thing that Trump and his legal team were trying to promote in the aftermath of the election. They were subpoenaed to try and get you from up from a state election board. This is somewhat separate from the state thing, but they're from the Trump legal case, but they were subpoenaed by the state election board to say, hey, you know, if you have evidence of this, all you've made all these claims that you have this explosive evidence, you have these whistleblowers who have come forward about, you know, ballot box stuff, and they eventually answered that subpoena by just saying, oh, we don't actually have any evidence that we can give you. So it seems like it wasn't just Trump. It was like there was an entire kind of network on the right that was manufacturing this false narrative. And like that, you know, is really the problem here. Whether it's legally actionable or not, I don't know. I'm not entirely, you know, I don't think I have a solid opinion on that. But the fact that there is this sort of cancer on the right that metastasized specifically in Georgia with these claims of election fraud, that's really problematic and I think is going to be an issue for the next election, regardless of what the outcome of the Trump case is. Yeah, I mean, this is also the cover story for the upcoming issue of Reason Magazine explores the question of what looks like, you know, it's not necessarily a likely outcome, but it's also not an impossible outcome that we might end up with a situation where a president is, you know, behind bars or slated to be behind bars at the time that he is elected. Or is that or is dead or is incapacitated. We actually explore all of those options in the cover story. But the Georgia case is particularly interesting because it is the one that is least subject to a kind of straightforward self pardon or kind of, you know, a federal path in which the, you know, the conviction would just be made to go away. It's a complicated process in Georgia. It's one that the president does not have control over. And so I think that that's one more reason why like so many eyes are on this case. I do recommend this cover story to you. It's by Keith Whittington, another Volk conspirator. And it's just a it's a it's sort of a flowchart of of a particular dystopia that we might find ourselves in come January of of next year. That was a clip from the Reason Roundtable podcast to watch more clips. Go here to watch the whole show. Go here and subscribe to the Reason Roundtable wherever you get your podcasts.