While the first hour of CNN’s Friday morning coverage on Fulton County, Georgia Judge Scott McAfee’s ruling allowing District Attorney Fani Willis to remain on the 2020 election case against Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants was fairly restrained, the same couldn’t be said about the second hour as Fake News Jim Acosta arrived for his hour of CNN Newsroom.
Between Acosta and his not-so-merry band of fellow leftist analysts and journalists, CNN viewers were treated to a meltdown about how Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade’s romantic relationship was proof of Donald Trump “sow[ing] distrust in the criminal justice system” and “played the system like a fiddle” and that even discussion of their affair was “sickening.”
Chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid had that first zinger, claiming this case was Trump “sow[ing] distrust in the criminal justice system” via...McAfee?
Wait, so Wade and Willis having an inappropriate relationship is somehow Trump’s fault?
Shortly after Reid seemed to suggest Willis needed to keep the case because “trust in the judicial system” is “at stake”, chief legal analyst Laura Coates kvetched that McAfee handed Team Trump “ammunition to try to attack her credibility and taint...the jury pool”.
However, as she repeatedly tried to do, she sought to cheer viewers up by reminding them Trump could still be prosecuted.
Acosta then lambasted McAfee ripping Wade and Willis’s lack of ethics as having “having to do with” the Trump case because he’s the one who’s supposed to be “on trial”.
Legal analyst Elliot Williams backed up him, arguing McAfee was out of line and “taking a pot shot” at the former lovers in a ruling that didn’t pan out as Trump and his co-defendants had hoped. In other words, Williams was comparing McAfee to former Biden Special Counsel Robert Hur.
Acosta and Trump 2024 correspondent Kristen Holmes proceeded to bellyache about how Trump will “take advantage of” and “run wild with this” and his supporters will “eat this up”.
Instead of keeping the focus on Wade and Willis’s lack of common decency not to mix work and pleasure (and luxury vacations), they whined this would be another instance of Trump “tak[ing] this nugget of truth” and “blow it up” so it helps him November (click “expand”):
ACOSTA: Yeah, and this is happening in the middle of a political campaign, obviously, Kristen, and Trump is going to run wild with this. He’s already been doing it out on the campaign trail at these rallies, talking about Fani Willis and Nathan Wade.
HOLMES: Yeah, he’s obsessed with Fani Willis.
ACOSTA: It almost sounds like Strzok and Lisa Page. It’s the same thing.
HOLMES: Right, it’s very, very similar.
(....)
HOLMES: So, when I look through this, I see how Donald Trump’s team is going to take advantage of it...[W]hen you actually look at how they’re going to use this, Donald Trump is going to repeat some of these lines in rallies.
ACOSTA: Oh yeah.
HOLMES: And...Donald Trump is going to use this and his supporters are going to eat this up...[T]his is what I’ve seen for the last several years. Donald Trump takes this nugget of truth.
(....)
HOLMES: So, Donald Trump takes a nugget of truth from this report and then he will blow it up and his people will believe him. And not just his people, he will be able to reach other people by using this because that is the tactic he has used since 2016.
Following a commercial break, Acosta went full-speed ahead into complete idiocy, first whining to CNN legal analyst Michael Moore (no, not that Michael Moore) that he feels “sicken[ed] to the stomach” the personal lives of Wade and Willis “got thrown into all of this” and, as a result, done “damage” to nabbing Trump.
Here again, no condemnation for Wade and Willis with all the scorn saved for anyone who thought potential conflicts of interest were more than a gadly-sized issue.
Acosta then huffed to senior legal analyst Elie Honig he could “hear some of our viewers at home saying, ‘why do I know more about the personal life of Fani Willis and Nathan Wade than I do about the details of this case of Donald Trump and these alleged co-conspirators trying to overturn election results in Georgia?’ I mean, is there some unfairness there[?]”
Following more happy talk from Coates for her fellow hardcore leftists that implied Atlanta residents will remember they were “impacted by the alleged actions of Donald Trump and the co-defendants”, Holmes played Debbie Downer by citing texts from Trumpworld sources who believe McAfee’s ruling was “a win for us”.
To this, Acosta joked like the petty fool he is: “They said they won before when they didn’t win, but anyway — yeah. If anyone remembers that.”
This prompted Williams to reemphasize the restlessness on the left that, time again, Trump could once again “tak[e] a fact — there’s a kernel of legal truth to it”, spin it, then toss “it like chum in the water and confus[e] the public.”
“[T]his has been my observation throughout this entire process that he has been able to play the legal system of this country like a fiddle,” Acosta replied.
After a comical aside between Acosta and Coates insisting this decision demanding Wade step down if Willis wants to continue was proof there’s no two-tiered justice system as some claim, Reid and Williams concluded the discussion by fretting “Trump...getting help” from the legal system will allow him to fill “people’s heads with misinformation, disinformation, facts that simply are not true” (click “expand”):
REID: I mean, Trump is getting help. It’s not just that there is a criminal mastermind sort of delaying everything. They’re getting help with judges, justices, and apparently prosecutors or whatever the heck happened last night. In New York with this evidence that just came out of nowhere. So the Justices of the Supreme Court, they, they could have resolved this issue of immunity months ago. They opted not to. They’re going to hear arguments. It’s not expect he’s going to win on the merits, but that’s helping him with delay. Again, even Judge Mcafee, the things that he said today, helping this strategy of undermining trust, but also delay. It took them awhile, right? He had time to do interviews. Probably could have done this a few days ago.
ACOSTA: Well, and the Justice Department —
REID: And also the prosecutors in New York. It’s not just them. They have a lot of help delaying this.
ACOSTA: — I mean, it’s not me saying it. A lot of legal experts have said the Justice Department took way too long —
WILLIAMS: Yeah.
ACOSTA: — to appoint a special prosecutor in Jack Smith, do the documents case to go after the January 6 case. Elliot, any final thoughts?
WILLIAMS: No, just my final thought is, I think — I — and I’m just going to sort of repeat the point. I think the great tragedy in all of this is that whenever any of these matters go to trial, you’re going to have to find 12 people who can sit fairly in judgment and the process of tainting a jury pool, getting in people’s heads with misinformation, disinformation, facts that simply are not true about cases can be a many years long process and like your point, Jim, the former President has played the system like a fiddle and gotten in people’s heads. And will in this case too, making it very hard to find 12 or 14, with alternates, Americans who can sit in judgment of his actual conduct and not have all this nonsense and lies and untruth —
ACOSTA: Yeah.
WILLIAMS: — kicking around in their heads. You know, as he saw, frankly from the text messages, Kirsten got, it’s already starting and they’re doing it again.
To see the relevant CNN transcript from March 15, click here.
