Smith paints a portrait. Willis, a landscape.
Special counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County DA Fani Willis issued complementary indictments in the Republican conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Dahlia Lithwick summarizes:
There’s one other notable contrast between the two stories that will be unspooled regarding the very similar events that took place after Donald Trump learned he’d lost the election and decided he would win it through organized crime. Smith chose to tell the story of an abstraction, crimes against democracy and the peaceful transfer of power. Willis is telling a concrete and detailed story of crimes against voters and election workers; Black voters in particular, female Black election workers in specific. In effect, Trump is on trial in D.C. for trying to break democracy and, in Fulton County, Georgia, for trying to set aside Black votes. The two stories are deeply connected, but they are also two very distinct acts of violence against elections. Smith reminds us what the country nearly lost, and Willis recalls what Black voters have almost never won.
The different emphases mean the stories the two documents tell unspool from different perspectives. Smith’s is more a speaking indictment of a single defendant surrounded by his closest co-conspirators. Willis indicted 19. Hers details the actions the many defendants took, including Trump’s Oval Office cabal, both singly and in concert, in Georgia and elsewhere, in furtherance of the conspiracy to undo Trump’s 2020 loss in Georgia. Here the scattered victims were Georgia voters and election officials.
Smith paints a portrait. Willis, a landscape.
So many actors and actions taking place in Willis’s sweeping portrayal mean the eye cannot take them all in at a glance, not unlike Atlanta’s Cyclorama. “As with many state criminal cases, the indictment is not crafted to tell a story so much as to put the defendants on notice of the allegations against them,” Lawfare notes. “As such, much of it reads like a relatively undifferentiated string of acts committed as part of the grand criminal enterprise it alleges.”
“Willis has declared that she has a monster of a hand. But she now has to play it,” Lawfare’s team explains, and sets out to craft a more digestible narrative. Read it here.
That “relatively undifferentiated string of acts” is already a target for Trump’s defenders bent on the public never perceiving the bigger picture Willis means to tell in court.
Behold:
Lithwick continues:
Finally—and again, this is both atmospheric and also very important—Fani Willis has not just formally named Trump as a mobbed-up crime boss, but also placed him squarely behind the wheel of a national criminal clown car. For Trump, stripped away from the sober officials who once lent him intellectual heft and political credibility, his final public act may well be honking sadly on the oversize horn, surrounded by the likes of Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Jeff Clark. The only thing more piteous than the mental picture of a diminished Donald Trump in the dock standing trial for lies, forgeries, and bullying is Donald Trump doing so in the presence of a whole host of people—tragically, with law degrees—who are living case studies in moral and intellectual mediocrity. His co-defendants are living proof that the personnel equivalent of spray tan that briefly tried to burnish him into looking like a principled and sober commander in chief after 2016—John Bolton, John Kelly, Bill Barr, among others—had well and truly departed the scene by the time of the 2020 election assault.
MAGA-fied Republicans insist they want a second civil war while attempting to erase the memory of the one they waged and lost between November 3, 2020 and January 20, 2021. Pray that in the name of moving on this country does not make the same mistakes it made in the aftermath of the first Civil War.
Update: Found a couple more examples of Price tweet via Roy Edroso.
