The Fulton County grand jury: Acknowledge what we still do not know, and deal with it

 Yes, like every other political junkie in the country, I anxiously awaited a hit of the good stuff last week, and it didn't happen.  My drug of choice being caffeine, I can only put it in terms of coffee, but it is as though one builds up a hope for the finest espresso in Italy, only to be handed shitty gas station coffee consisting of water run through the same burnt grounds that have been used 20 times.  And you drink it anyway because you're a junkie, you pathetic fuck.  (I'm trying an Ethiopian light roast this morning, as a change of pace.  Nice, but despite the higher caffeine content in light roasts, I'll pass next time.)  Anyway, the political news of the week was the unsealing of a small portion of the grand jury's report from Fulton County.  What did we learn?  Two things:  Jack, and shit, and to quote Ash, Jack left town.

There was a unanimous vote that someone committed perjury.  Who, how, and such?  Dunno.  What else did the grand jury think?  Also dunno.  What do we know?  Nothing.  What should we have expected to know?

Nothing.  Get comfortable in your ignorance.  This is not how criminal investigations work.  Did you expect a leak?  Leaks happen, but not this time.  Why not?  Because Fani Willis has political ambitions.  So here's the deal.  There are several possible criminal cases against Donald Trump.  On strict legal grounds, the Fulton County case is not the strongest.  The strongest on the law is the documents case, but the problems there are threefold.  First, Merrick Garland really does not want to charge Donald Trump because he thinks that would be "political," with quote-marks around the word, "political," to indicate a vague and undefined application of the term, as in the case of the legal concept of "a political question."  The criminal case against Donald Trump is not so much "a political question" in the legal sense, to the degree that anything is, but rather, Garland believes that by being weak-kneed and lily-livered, he demonstrates that he is a non-partisan straight-arrow.  Second, the probability of conviction began with the obstacle that keeping Republicans off the jury would never be possible, and the idea of a Republican convicting Donald Trump for anything, regardless of facts presented, was always a stretch at best.

And then classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center, and in Biden's home.

On legal grounds, does that matter?  No.  Biden's lawyers found them, handed them over, invited the Feds to search, and that makes the legal case completely different.

But the existence of such papers makes it politically impossible for Garland to charge Trump and not Biden.  So he won't.  Merrick Garland's north star is "look at how nonpartisan I am!"  How does he follow that north star?  He cannot charge Biden, therefore he will not charge Trump.  Trump just skated at the federal level, and he was never going to face any federal charges on January 6.  Never.

The SDNY stuff?  Maybe, but we haven't seen enough yet.  Fani Willis, though, has completely different incentives from Merrick Garland.  If she charges Trump, Trump will be acquitted.  There's no way she gets a conviction.  Even that famed statement on the phone call to Rafffensperger:  "I just want to find 11,780 votes" was followed by the statement, "because we won the state."  Meaning:  Trump thought he won.  Getting a conviction requires convincing the jury that Trump knew he lost.  That phone call transcript shows Trump saying, over and over again, that he won.  Did he win?  No, but this is one of those legal matters on which the stupidity defense works.  You cannot sell heroin and evade conviction by saying that you didn't know it was illegal, but you can get an acquittal on conspiracy and related charges by demonstrating state of... sure, let's call it "mind."  Combine that with the basic, underlying fact that there will be Republicans on that jury and Trump is assured of an acquittal.  Easiest acquittal in criminal history.  As the saying goes, you can indict a ham sandwich, but you cannot convict Trump on this.  He's too stupid to get convicted.

The question is Fani Willis.  What does she want?  Unlike Merrick Garland, she's fine charging Trump and losing the case because working her way up the Democratic Party is a different process.  Being the prosecutor who charges Trump is still a feather in her cap, even losing.  So she may charge him, even knowing she'll lose.

Which she will.

But that depends, to a significant extent, on the grand jury.

Which brings us to what we do not know, were not going to find out, and cannot know until such time as information is revealed.  Were Fani Willis to leak information improperly here, that would undo everything, so she can't.  She has to play this straight, even if her intent is to bring charges in a trial that she knows she'll lose.

So we wait.  As we should have known we would.  What did we learn?  Nothing.  What should we have expected to learn?  Nothing.  We wait.  Drink your goddamned gas station coffee.

I missed jazz yesterday.  Here's Ibrahim Maalouf, "Waiting," the version from 40 Melodies.