Hanging By a Thread
I am sitting here doing what we have all done so much in the past seven or so years, I am watching a “Breaking News” chiron on MSNBC. I understand that many people think that MSNBC is a strongly liberal-biased cable news channel in the same way that they think that Fox News is a strongly conservatively-biased cable news channel. The viewership numbers favor Fox News based on Nielsen data with almost twice as many people watching Fox (1.95 million average viewers) versus MSNBC (1.05 million average viewers). Only ESPN with its ubiquitous and all-encompassing sports coverage is more watched with 3.38 million viewers. CNN is a distant third now in news coverage with 537 thousand average viewers based on its dramatic fall from grace from the Trump Town Hall coverage. In general, CNN had been thought to be liberal-leaning, but who knows these days. But one thing that is hard to deny is that Fox News has done a very effective job of hooking its audience with Fox owning nine of the top ten shows on cable news. Some will suggest that Fox News therefore better represents the views of the majority of Americans, but I think we all know better. Polling and recent elections show us that Fox viewers are less the majority than they are fully committed to the Fox News and Republican Party narrative and that says less about the overarching views of our nation and more about the effective commercial methods used by Fox News and, indeed, the Republican Party in messaging at all costs. I will declare my bias in this debate by stating quite clearly that simple messaging is always easier than complex and thoughtful messaging.
The drama of the moment (it is after 10pm EDT) is that the Fulton County, Georgia Grand Jury brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has returned a televised adjudication of ten indictments to the presiding District Judge. That was the full slate of indictments that were sought by Fani Willis with no “true bills” or denials given over by the jury. In an extraordinary change in the legal process, a pool camera was allowed in the courtroom and even in the hallway outside the county clerk’s window. We got to see the clerk sign the jury verdict and naturally, the news crews photographed and enlarged the cover sheet she signed that read that they had returned ten indictments and no “true bills”. We watched as the clerk, surrounded by security forces, walk the indictments into the courtroom, where she delivered them to the judge. The judge then slowly turned pages repeatedly without telling the global viewing audience what he was reading. The indictments then were walked back into the bowels of court administrative area where the indictments were to be processed. We were told that the processing would take up to three hours and so the panel of cable news announcers spent the following two hours letting us hang by a thread doing things like interviewing Hilary Clinton and reviewing everything they could think of reviewing knowing well that most loyal viewers would not dream of touching the dial while this piece of news was pending and the other shoe about the details of the indictments had yet to drop.
The details of the indictment have now been filed in full disclosure on the Fulton County Courthouse website. While this is being written real-time and the full analysis of this 98-page indictment document will take some time (think of all the legal analysts and political pundits that are burning the midnight oil as they try to read and dissect this critically important document). What we know so far is that the people indicted number 19, headed, as expected, by Donald J. Trump with 41 specific crimes and 161 separate acts, wrapped in the overall charge of the formation of a criminal enterprise and thus a criminal organization as defined under Georgia’s RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute. What is detailed is how Trump, along with notable co-conspirators like Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, as well as 14 others, heavily populated by local Georgia Republicans who all conspired to try and fraudulently overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia and other swing states like Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc. What is important to understand about RICO is that all Fani Willis has to prove is that 2 of the 161 acts were, indeed committed and therefore the RICO charges would stick. And since Donald Trump’s name is mentioned 193 times in the document, its not hard to see that the focus is on him.
This information is so breathlessly being reviewed by so many and is being awaited by so many more of us in that it runs to the very heart of our democratic process. During the two-hour interregnum, we heard just about every potential conspiracy theory that the pundits could invoke about what schemes the Republicans who want this issue to all just go away, can possibly do to make it go away. I think it is fair to say that this is a genie that once out of the bottle will be almost impossible to put back into the bottle. Some of the issues that this indictment brings into play are well known. The best known of these is that as a state indictment, these charges, if they lead to convictions, cannot be pardoned by any federal official (like the President), and even the governor or Georgia, even if he/she was so inclined, cannot pardon the convicted parties before five years. While we all understand how the unpardonable nature of these charges are important, the derivative benefit of that reality is that the eighteen co-conspirators (other than Trump) are suddenly under considerably more pressure as they have no hope of getting help from “the big guy”, which would tend to make many of them unwilling to do jail time for their fearless leader. Note that of the ten alternate Republican electors, eight have already signed deals of immunity with the prosecutor and that is a very strong indicator of the likely flipping potential among the eighteen co-conspirators. This is big for both the Fulton County case and for the development of important information for Jack Smith’s federal case against Trump. The triangulation prosecutorial potential is enormous.
One of the things that was said tonight by Chris Hayes is that the American electoral system has evolved as a highly distributed and, some would say arcane, system that is both subject to much speculation and possible manipulation, but which, in the case of the 2020 election, has held up extremely well. It has been an interesting evening, spent, admittedly, entirely on MSNBC, but will be followed up by reading tomorrow morning on other cable news outlets (probably not Fox) and in a full array of respected news outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal (a Murdoch publication), the Financial Times, the Economist, the New Yorker, Apple News and maybe even National Geographic and Sunset Magazine (just kidding on that one). One thing we know after listening to Fani Willis at the podium, is that she currently intends to prosecute all 19 defendants together (which Andrew Weissman says is crazy and won’t happen) and to bring forth a trial date within six months (also deemed a very aggressive schedule for such a complex case that took 2.5 years to bring to indictment).
All in all, I think tonight is a foreshadowing of what we are all in for in the next fifteen months when we will all be hanging by a thread.