MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos on Friday criticized Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ performance during her Thursday testimony.
Willis testified during a hearing on whether she should be disqualified from her election interference case against former President Donald Trump for improperly benefiting financially from appointing special prosecutor Nathan Wade to the case. Willis gave long answers and did not directly answer questions, which Cevallos said made her a poor witness on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Fani Willis Failed To Disclose Airline Ticket Paid For By Alleged Lover, Docs Show)
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“Do I think that Fani Willis was a good witness? No, not by any metric by which you measure witnesses who testify in court,” Cevallos asserted. “Do I think she was effective as a politician? Do I think she gave good speeches? Do we have good sound bites from what she said? Absolutely, but if you went back about seven minutes, the usual question was something, like, ‘can you state your name for the record?’ She was answering the question she wanted to answer. She was going off on tangents, and by the way, it may have carried the day for her. If her mission was to send a message, she sent a message, but there is no way I think that you can say that as a witness who was supposed to follow the rules of evidence, and as a lawyer who should know the rules, that she was answering questions in a proper way as a witness.”
While Willis’ testimony aligned with Wade’s, that does not necessarily mean their testimony was believable, Cevallos added.
“As for being consistent, was she consistent with Nathan Wade? Yeah, but consistency isn’t always credible,” he said. “In other words, you can have a criminal defendant who says, ‘that was not me who robbed the bank,’ but you’ve got DNA, video, finger fingerprints, cooperating witnesses and they’ll consistently until the end of time say, time say, ‘I didn’t do it.’ It doesn’t mean it’s credible.”
“And I’m not saying there’s any evidence of criminality here, obviously, but is it credible just because Fani Willis and Nathan Wade have their stories straight? Is it credible that after these two in a romantic relationship went on trips to Aruba, that the district attorney pulled out an envelope of sweaty cash and peeled off thousands of dollars and handed it to him? Is that credible? Well, I ask you, any of you have been on trips with your romantic paramours, did you do that after you got back from the trip? Peel off a wad of cash and repay them for it? I have yet to find someone who has done that,” Cevallos added.
However, Willis will likely not be disqualified from the case, Cevallos said.
Anna Cross, representing Willis’ office, chose not to call the district attorney to testify Friday as planned, saying she has no further questions. Willis took a combative stance Thursday on the witness stand in response to inquiries from defense attorneys, and at one point one of her outbursts caused Judge Scott McAfee to call for a break.
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