An essential part of the rule of law in a civilized country is a criminal justice system that follows the law. After all, if the criminal justice system is lawless, why should anyone else act lawfully? And if you’re a prosecutor, one of the most important parts of lawful conduct is that you don’t indict people you know are innocent. That brings us to Fani Willis, the prosecutor in Fulton County, Georgia, who has indicted not only Trump but also his lawyers and supporters, all of whom looked at the bizarre election night county and concluded that there was a problem. The Federalist alleges that Willis is holding onto evidence proving that two of the named defendants cannot be guilty of the charges against them.

According to the indictment that saw Trump and his supporters arrested, all of the defendants were engaged in a “conspiracy” to overturn the election results. Two of the people charged were David Shafer, a Republican elector, and Ray Smith, one of Trump’s lawyers. Willis’s legal theory was that Shafer and the other Republican electors falsely claimed that they were the legitimate electors. By taking this position, and with Smith advocating for them, they were trying to mislead Mike Pence and Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, two arch-RINOs. To state the argument is to expose how ridiculous it is but that’s what Willis is running with.

But there’s a problem: It turns out that Willis is holding onto documents proving that neither Shafer nor Smith were asserting that they were the legitimate electors:

Image: Fani Willis. YouTube screen grab.

However, among the documents Willis obtained during her years-long investigation of Republicans was a meeting transcript refuting her allegations.

A transcript of the Georgia Republican electors’ Dec. 14, 2020, meeting, obtained by The Federalist, explicitly shows the intent behind casting alternate electors was not to impersonate public officers, as Willis alleged, but to lawfully preserve Trump’s legal challenge to the state’s election results. At the meeting’s outset, Shafer specifically noted how he and his fellow Republicans were acting as “Republican nominees for Presidential Elector,” not as “duly elected and qualified” presidential electors.

“[President Trump] has filed a contest to the certified returns. That contest — is pending [and has] not been decided or even heard by any judge with the authority to hear it,” Shafer said. “And so in order to preserve his rights, it’s important that the Republican nominees for Presidential Elector meet here today and cast their votes.”

(Go to The Federalist for more information about the position that Shafer and Smith were asserting, something that echoed what Democrats did in 1960 when it looked as if Nixon would win.)

What Willis is doing is the essence of corruption. In this regard, consider that all the power in the criminal justice system resides in the state. It is a package consisting of the police, the judge, and the executioner. In the lead-up to the trial, the defendant is utterly helpless. Even if he has a good lawyer, a corrupt judge can keep him locked away for years, as we’ve seen with the January 6 detainees. The jury is the wildcard but, in a one party county like Fulton, even the jury becomes an arm of the government.

The only bulwark against this absolute power is a prosecutor who refuses to be corrupted. Fani Willis, though, is the living embodiment of Lord Acton’s dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As the head of a one-party criminal justice system, Willis isn’t even making a pretense of non-partisanship, nor is she abiding by the law. (I haven’t yet delved into the details, but Techno Fog also contends that Willis is guilty of the same conduct that serves as the basis of her indictment against the Georgia defendants.)